CHAPTER XXXII

SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET HER WEAPON

Judith Marsett stood in her room to receive Nesta's hero. She was
flushed, and had thinned her lips for utterance of a desperate thing,
after the first severe formalities.

Her aim was to preserve an impressive decorum. She was at the same time
burning to speak out furious wrath, in words of savage rawness, if they
should come, as a manner of slapping the world's cheek for the state to
which it reduces its women; whom one of the superior creatures can
insult, and laugh.

Men complaining of the 'peace which is near their extinction,' have but
to shuffle with the sex; they will experience as remarkable a change as
if they had passed off land on to sea.

Dartrey had some flitting notion of the untamed original elements women
can bring about us, in his short observant bow to Mrs. Marsett, following
so closely upon the scene with Mrs. Blathenoy.

But this handsome woman's look of the dull red line of a sombre fire,
that needed only stir of a breath to shoot the blaze, did not at all
alarm him. He felt refreshingly strung by it.

She was discerned at a glance to be an aristocratic member of regions