Ariane ma soeur! de quel amour blessée Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée!
She taught Mother to recite Phèdre's great speeches with such fire and passion. There could hardly be a better training for French," said Miss Toner, repeating the lines with a curious placidity and perfection. "I preferred Mademoiselle Jouffert's rendering to Bernhardt's. Her Phèdre was, with all the fire, more tender and womanly."
"Do you care about Racine?" Oldmeadow asked her, while the lines rang in his ears--rather as in his dream the rooks' cawing had done--with an evocative sadness that hung, irrelevantly, about their speaker. "It's not easy for our English ears to hear the fire and passion, is it; but they are there."
"He is very perfect and accomplished," said Miss Toner. "But I always feel him small beside our Shakespeare. He lacks heart, doesn't he?"
"There's heart in those lines you've just recited."
"Yes," said Miss Toner. "Those lines are certainly very beautiful. It's the mere music of them, I think. They make me feel--" she paused. It was unlike her to pause and he wondered what she made of Ariane, off her own bat, without Mademoiselle Jouffert to help her.
"They are so sad--so terribly melancholy. The sound of them. They make me want to cry when I hear them. But I think it's the sound; for their meaning makes me indignant. There is such weakness in them; such acceptance of destiny. I want to revolt and protest, too--for women. She should not have died."
Oldmeadow involuntarily glanced across at Nancy. She was looking at Miss Toner and if she had been pale before, she was paler now. Nancy would never think of herself in connection with Ariane and tragic grief; yet something in the lines, something in Miss Toner's disavowal of their applicability, had touched the hidden cut. And, once again, it was Meg's eyes that met his, showing him that what he saw she saw, too. Barney saw nothing. All his solicitude was for Miss Toner in her imaginary plight. "I'm sure you never would!" he exclaimed. "Never die, I mean!"
"You think Miss Toner would have come to terms with Bacchus," Oldmeadow suggested. He didn't want to take it out of Barney, though he was vexed with him, nor to take it out of Miss Toner, either. He only wanted to toss and twist the theme and make it gay where Miss Toner made it solemn.