CHAPTER XVII Emma Snow took alarm first. “Do you want Ivy to marry Sên King-lo?” she suddenly asked her husband one morning. “Damn! Hell!” the phlegmatic Englishman cried hotly. He was shaving, and he’d cut himself rather badly. (He had a dressing-room of his own, and used it but rarely.) He sopped off the blood as well as he could, then flung about on his wife more angry and ruder than she ever had seen him. “Don’t be disgusting!” he snapped. “I see what I see,” she retorted smoothly. “I decline to listen to preposterous, lying, nauseating vulgarity,” Snow growled, his mouth twitching angrily. “Such a hideous idea never entered, or could, any head but yours.” “I see what I see,” she repeated good-humoredly. She was sorry for Charlie. “Blow what you see!” Rage, and perhaps a subconscious sick fear, obsessed him, made him forget himself in their torturing grip. “Use your eyes!” his wife advised him more coldly. And, not unjustly incensed, she finished her own toilet in silence, and went down to the breakfast-room without a glance or a word more. Dr. Ray saw it next. The physician was still in Washington. Independent now of her large Chicago practice, she took more and more time each year for the travel and study she loved; and few years passed in which she did not make at least one stay of weeks, if not months, in Washington. “Do you want pretty Miss Gilbert to marry Sên King-lo?” she asked Miss Julia as they sat one morning at breakfast. Miss Julia was furious. Her old hands trembled so that she dropped the cup she was lifting. It had been in the Townsends’ possession only goodness and the gods of the South knew how long; and she didn’t give it a look as it crashed in fragments on the floor, nor a glance to the pools of hot coffee staining the breakfast damask and her crisp morning-gown. She didn’t say “Damn,” and she didn’t say “Hell”; but for all that, she answered her friend very much as Sir Charles Snow had answered his wife. The physician took it in perfect good part. But she stood her ground. “I can’t help thinking that this is just what it is shaping towards, Julia.” “You are horrible,” Miss Townsend moaned sickly. “It couldn’t be.” “Why not?” Dr. Ray demanded gently. Julia Townsend shrank back in her chair—speechless. She could not have been more surprised, dismayed, disappointed if Jefferson Davis had proved a traitor or Robert E. Lee disgraced his uniform—not half so much so if Mexico’s gulf had submerged her beloved South. She felt soiled by the tongue of a friend. “Why not?” Dr. Ray insinuated. “Why not! Because the bare suggestion is abominable,” Miss Julia exclaimed. “I’d _kill_ Sên King-lo if I believed that he even could harbor the vile thought—which I know he could not.”