"Have you ever seen anything like it before?" Alicia asked Captain
Yardley; and he said he thought he had once, in Algiers, but not nearly
so well done. Arnold rose again to go, but the Magdalene had begun the
well-known passage with Pilate, about which the newspapers absurdly
reported later that if Miss Howe had not been a Protestant, and so
impervious the Pope would have excommunicated her, and as he looked his
movement imperceptibly changed to afford him a better place. He put
an undecided hand upon a prop of the box that rose behind Alicia's
shoulder, and so stood leaning and looking, more conspicuous in the
straight lines and short shoulder cape of the frock of his Order than
he knew. Hilda, in one of those impenetrable regards which she threw
straight in front of her, while Pilate yawped and posed nearer and
nearer the desire of the Magdalene to be admitted to his household,
was at once aware of him. Presently he sat down again--it was still the
profane, the fabulous, the horrible Patullo, but a strain of pure gold
had come into the fabric worth holding in view, impossible, indeed, to
close the eyes upon. Far enough it was from any semblance to historical
fact, but almost possible, almost admissible, in the form of the woman,
as historical fiction. She dared to sit upon the floor now, in the
ungraceful huddled Eastern fashion, clasping her knees to her breast,
with her back half turned to her lord, the friend of Caesar, so that
he could not see the design that sat behind the mask of her sharp
indifference. She rested her chin upon her knees, and let the blankness
of her beauty exclaim upon the subtlety of her replies, plainly
measuring the power of her provocation against the impoverished quality
that camp and grove, court and schools, might leave upon august Roman
sensibilities. It was the old, old sophistication, so perfect in its
concentration behind the kol-brushed eyes and the brown breasts, the
igniting, flickering, raging of an instinct upon the stage. Alicia, when
it was over, said to Mrs. Yardley, "How the modern woman goes off upon