“Are you sick, miss?”
“Go away,” said Loftus, “there is nothing the matter.”
“Nothing?” exclaimed Marie. “Nothing!” she repeated in a higher key. “Nothing!” Then, visibly, anger enveloped her. “Do you call it nothing to be cheated and decoyed? Nothing to have faith and love and be gammoned of them by a living lie, by a perjury in flesh and blood? Is that what you call nothing? Is it? Then tell me what something is?”
At the moment she stared at Loftus, her lips still moving, her breast heaving, her small hands clenched, her face very white. And Loftus stared at her. In the vehemence and contempt of her anger he did not recognize at all the kitten of the year before. But it was very vulgar, he decided.
That vulgarity Blanche complicated at once. “What has he done, miss?” she asked, her hands on her hips.
“Done?” Marie echoed. “He has made me drink of shame. Now, tired of that, he is going.”
“Not to leave you, miss?”
“To leave me for another woman.”
“Then hanging is too good for him.”
Loftus gestured at the negress. “I say,” he called. “Did you hear what I told you? Go away and hold your tongue.”
Blanche’s eyes that had rolled whitely before were rolling now not merely whitely but wildly.
“I won’t go away, sir. I won’t hold my tongue, sir. I am as good as you, sir. I have a son that’s better nor you, sir. He wouldn’t treat a lady as you