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Dahlia cast a fearful eye about her; her eyelids fluttered as from a savage sudden blow. Hardening her mouth to utter defiant spite: "My lover's," she cried. "He is. If he loves me and I love him, he is my lover, my lover, my lover! Nothing shall stop me from saying it lover! and there is none to claim me but he. Oh, loathsome! What a serpent it is I've got round me! And you tell me God put it.
Great pity for the poor enmeshed life, helpless there, and in a woman's worst peril, looking either to madness, or to death, for an escape drowned her reason in a heavy cloud of tears. Long on toward the stroke of the hour, Dahlia heard her weep, and she murmured on, "You deceived me;" but it was no more to reproach; rather, it was an exculpation of her reproaches. "You did deceive me, Rhoda."
As he faced the depression of it, he was more than ever determined to end it, conclusively, that evening, but Mrs. Feverel's gloom and Dahlia's little attempts at coquettish gaiety frightened him. The conversation, supported mainly by Dahlia, fell into terrible lapses, and the attempts to start it again had the unhappy air of desperate remedies doomed to failure.
Whereupon Rhoda cried out, "Dahlia was right she was right, uncle." "She was right, my dear, if she was a ten-thousander. She wasn't right as a farmer's daughter with poor expectations. I'd say humble, if humble she were. As a farmer's daughter, she should choose the violet side. That's clear as day.
Let us not blindly accept the indications which they afford us. It would be a mistake to write to Liege for corks, and to Pau for gloves. Miss Dahlia, were I in your place, I would call myself Rosa. A flower should smell sweet, and woman should have wit.
"Ah no, I know," went on Dahlia. "But it is not, I assure you, a case for melodrama but a very plain, simple little affair that is happening everywhere all the time. You say that you cannot understand why I should wish to keep the letters. Let me try and explain, and also let me try and urge on you that it is really no good at all trying to change my mind.
As soon as she had done so, fearing from habit for some possible disastrous result, she tried immediately to draw away from the subject. But the forbidden spring had been touched a door that had long been closed between them swung open. Young Berber, sorting dahlia bulbs into numbered boxes, looked up; he met her eyes unsuspiciously.
Whereupon Rhoda cried out, "Dahlia was right she was right, uncle." "She was right, my dear, if she was a ten-thousander. She wasn't right as a farmer's daughter with poor expectations. I'd say humble, if humble she were. As a farmer's daughter, she should choose the violet side. That's clear as day.
That his affection for Dahlia was dead there could be no question, but that it was buried, either for himself or the public, was, most unfortunately, not the case. He was afraid of discovery for the first time in his life, and it was unpleasant. Dahlia herself would be quiet; at least, he was almost sure, although her outbreak the other evening had surprised him. But he was afraid of Mrs. Feverel.
She talked reasonably; and Rhoda, hearing her question and answer at meal-times like a sane woman, was in doubt whether her sister wilfully simulated a partial insanity when they were alone together. Now, in the garden, Dahlia said: "All those flowers, my dear, have roots in mother and me. She can't feel them, for her soul's in heaven. But mine is down there.
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