Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/163



Like a hypnotic subject Mrs. Toomey heard herself whimpering:

"People will talk about it—Mrs. Pantin has warned me—and I'll—I'll get left out of everything, and—and when Jap gets into something it will hurt us in our business."

Kate got up from her knees; involuntarily Mrs. Toomey did likewise.

The girl did not speak but folded her arms and looked at her "friend." Mrs. Toomey had the physical sensation of shrivelling: as though she were standing naked before the withering heat of a blast furnace.

In the silence that seemed interminable, Kate's eyes moved from her head to her shabby shoes and back again, slowly, as though she wished to impress her appearance upon her memory, to the minutest detail.

As by divination, Mrs. Toomey saw herself as Kate saw her. Stripped of the virtues in which the girl had clothed her, she stood forth a scheming, inconsequential little coward in a weak ineffectual rack of a body—not strong enough to be vicious, without the courage to be dangerous. Thin-lipped, neutral-tinted, flat of chest and scrawny, without a womanly charm save the fragility that incited pity; to Kate who had idealized her she now seemed a stranger.

Kate completed her scrutiny, and searched her mind for the word which best expressed the result of it. Her lip curled unconsciously when she found it. She said with deliberate scathing emphasis:

"You—Judas Iscariot!"

Then she walked out, feeling that the very earth had given way beneath her.

Nothing was definite, nothing tangible or certain; there was not anybody or anything in the world, apparently,