"You might, for instance, have your heart plucked out by a vulture while you're lying helpless."
"Poison the carcass!" Emma elegantly advised. "That'll finish the vulture before it has time to gorge full." And, as he straddled his battered bicycle, he added a significant remark, which showed that he very well knew what he was talking about. "Lundi'll always be blind about women, anyway."
Tryon did not return to Druro's room, but went thoughtfully toward that wing of the hospital in which he knew the quarters of the young and pretty matron to be situated. Having found her, he put before her so urgent and convincing an appeal for an interview with Mrs. Hading that she went herself to ask that lady to receive him. A clinching factor was an adroit remark about his brother's interest in Druro's chances. He guessed that such a remark repeated would bring him into Marice Hading's presence quicker than anything else, and he was right. Within five minutes, he was in the softly shaded, violet-scented room where Druro had groped his way some nights before--the difference being that he could see that which Druro had mercifully been spared.
The beauty of the woman sitting in the long chair had been torn from her like a veil behind which she had too long hidden her real self. Now that she was stripped, a naked thing in the wind, all eyes could see her deformities and read her cold and arid soul. The furies of rage and rancour were grabbling at her heart, even as the leopard had scrabbled on her face. It was not the mere disfigurement of the angry, purplish scars that twisted her mouth and puckered her cheeks. A shining spirit, gentle and brave in affliction might have transformed even these, robbing them of their hideousness. But here was one who had "thrown down every temple she had built," and whose dark eyes were empty now of anything except a malign and bitter ruin. It was as though nothing could longer cover and conceal her cynical dislike of all things but herself. The face set on the long, ravaged throat, once so subtly alluring, had turned hawklike and cruel. It seemed shrivelled, too, and, between the narrow linen bandages she still wore, it had the cunning malice of some bird of prey peering from a barred cage.