Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/50

 It was a flat, metallic voice, without color, and after she had spoken, she took no more notice of him. She appeared to be fascinated by the spectacle of Naomi and the black girls repeating their lessons. About the hard mouth there flickered the merest shadow of mockery.

There was something menacing in the presence of the Englishwoman, something which seemed to fill the hot air with an electric tension. It was like having a fragment of some powerful explosive suddenly placed in their midst for a few hours, something which they might regard without touching. Also she was extremely hard and disagreeable.

She ate with them at the crude table fashioned by Swanson, having herself contributed the meat—the tenderest portion of a young antelope shot early that morning on the plains by her own hand. She talked of the country with a sort of harassed intensity as if she hated and despised it and yet was powerless to resist its fascination.

"They're no earthly good, these damned niggers," she said, "they'd all leave me at the clap of a hand to die of starvation and thirst. It's only the Arab's whip that keeps them in order."

Philip felt himself hating her for her arrogance and for the contempt she had for all this world, including themselves, but he sometimes felt as she did about the "damned niggers." He saw Naomi recoil as the words fell from the stranger's thin, hard lips. It was blasphemy to speak thus of their black brothers, of God's children.

But Lady Millicent did give them much valuable information about the Lake tribes and their fierce