第16章 Spite.(3)

"Oh,stop them;smoke;do anything hateful you wish,so you don't break my neck.I will never ride with you again,and I wish I had never come to this horrid place;and if your sneering painter does not leave soon,I will.""I'm afraid Van would survive,and you only suffer from your spite.

But come,since you have so sweetly permitted me to smoke,I'll make your penance as light as possible,and then we will consider matters even between us,"and away they bowled up breezy hills and down into shady valleys,Stanton stolidly smoking,and Ida nursing her petty wrath.Two flitting ghosts hastening to escape from the light of day,could not have seen less,or have felt less sympathy with the warm beautiful scenes through which they were passing.

There is no insulation so perfect as that of small,selfish natures preoccupied with a pique.

When,late in the afternoon,her cousin,with mock politeness,assisted her to alight at the entrance of the hotel,Ida was compelled to feel that she had indeed been the chief victim of her own spite.

but,with the usual logic of human nature,she never thought of blaming herself,and her resentment was chiefly directed against the man whose every word and glance,although he was but a stranger,had seemed to possess a power to annoy and wound from the first.

She felt an almost venomous desire to retaliate;but he appeared invulnerable in his quiet and easy superiority,while she,who expected,as a matter of course,that all masculine thoughts should follow her admiringly,had been compelled to see that his critical eyes had detected that in her which had awakened his contempt.

"I'll teach him this evening,when my gentlemen friends arrive,how ridiculous are his airs,"she muttered,as she went to her room and sought to enhance her beauty by all the arts of which she was the mistress."I'll show him that there are plenty who can see what he cannot,or will not.Because he is an artist,he need not think he can face me out of the knowledge of my beauty,the existence of which I have been assured of by so many eyes and tongues ever since I can remember."When she came down to await the arrival of the stages and carriages,she was indeed radiant with all the beauty of which she was then capable.Her neck and shoulders,with their exquisite lines and curves,were more suggestively revealed than hidden by a slight drapery of gauze-like illusion,and her white rounded arms were bare.She trod with the light airy grace of youth,and yet with the assured manner of one who is looking forward to the familiar experiences of a reigning belle.

Van Berg,from his quiet corner of observation,was compelled to admit that,seen at her present distance,she almost embodied his best dreams,and might do so wholly were there less of the fashionable art of the hour,and more of nature in her appearance.But he knew well that if she came nearer,and spoke so as to reveal herself,the fatal defect in her beauty would be as apparent as a black line running athwart the sculptured face of a Greek goddess.The only question with him was,did the ominous deformity lie so near the surface that it could be refined away,or was it ingrained into the very material of her nature,thus forming an essential part of herself?He feared that the latter might be true,or that the remedy was far beyond his skill or power;but every glance he caught of the girl,as with her mother she paced the farther end of the piazza,deepened his regret,as an artist,that so much beauty should be in degrading bondage to a seeming fool.