eplied. "Who wants to look at you?
You're consumed with vanity! You're a monster of conceit! Surely, Helen,
you ought to have taught her by this time that she's a person of no
conceivable importance whatever--not beautiful, or well dressed, or
conspicuous for elegance or intellect, or deportment. A more ordinary
sight than you are," he concluded, "except for the tear across your
dress has never been seen. However, stay at home if you want to. I'm
going."

She appealed again to her aunt. It wasn't the being looked at, she
explained, but the things people were sure to say. The women in
particular. She liked women, but where emotion was concerned they were
as flies on a lump of sugar. They would be certain to ask her questions.
Evelyn M. would say: "Are you in love? Is it nice being in love?"
And Mrs. Thornbury--her eyes would go up and down, up and down--she
shuddered at the thought of it. Indeed, the retirement of their life
since their engagement had made her so sensitive, that she was not
exaggerating her case.

She found an ally in Helen, who proceeded to expound her views of the
human race, as she regarded with complacency the pyramid of variegated
fruits in the centre of the table. It wasn't that they were cruel, or
meant to hurt, or even stupid exactly; but she had always found that the
ordinary person had so little emotion in his own life that the scent of
it in the lives of others was like the scent of blood in the nostrils of
a bloodhound. Warming to the theme, she continued:

"Directly anything happens--it may be a marriage, or a birth, or a
death--on the whole they prefer it to be a death--every one wants to see
you. They insist upon seeing you. They've got nothing to say; they
don't care a rap for you; but you've got to go to lunch or to tea or to
dinner, and if you don't you're damned. It's the smell of blood," she
continued; "I don't blame 'em; only they shan't have mind if I know it!"

She looked about her as if she had called up a legion of human beings,
all hostile and all disagreeable, who encircled the table, with mouths
gaping for blood, and made it appear a little island of neutral country
in the midst of the enemy's country.

Her words roused her husband, who had been muttering rhythmically to
himself, surveying his guests and his food and his wife with eyes that
were now melancholy and now fierce, according to the fortunes of the
lady in his ballad. He cut Helen short with a protest. He hated