* * * * * CHAPTER XXXVI PALLAS Not even her intimates knew the nature of the humiliations and the sufferings that had created Mrs. Falconer’s attitude towards man. She was a tall and rather silent woman, fair-haired, grey-eyed, with a face that was young in outline and old in its white reserve. There was nothing slipshod or casual about her. She dressed with discrimination, yet even in the wearing of her clothes she suggested the putting on of armour, the linking up of chain mail. Someone had nicknamed her “Pallas.” She moved finely, stood still finely, and spoke in a level, full-toned voice that had a peculiar knack of dominating the conversation without effort and without self-consciousness. People turned and looked at her directly she entered a room. Yet Mrs. Falconer did not play to her public. It was not the case of a superlatively clever woman conducting an ambitious campaign. There was something behind her cold serenity, a silent forcefulness, a superior vitality that made people turn to her, watch her, listen to what she said. She suggested the instinctive thought, “This woman has suffered; this woman knows; she is implacable; can keep a secret.” And all of us are a little afraid of the silent people who can keep secrets, who watch us, who listen while we babble, and who, with one swift sentence, send an arrow straight to the heart of things while we have been shooting all over the target. Sentimentalists might have said that Mrs. Falconer was a splendid white rose without any perfume. Whether the emotions had been killed in her, whether she had ever possessed them, or whether she concealed them jealously, was a matter of conjecture. She was well off, had a house near Hyde Park and a cottage in Sussex. She was more than a mere clever, highly cultured woman of the world. Weininger would have said that she was male. The name of Pallas suited her. Eve Carfax had lain in bed for a week in a little room on the third floor of Mrs. Falconer’s house, and during that week she had been content to lie there without asking herself any questions. The woman doctor who attended her was a lanky good fellow, who wore pince-nez and had freckles all over her face. Eve did not do much talking. She smiled, took what she was given, slept a great deal, being aware of an emptiness within her that had to be filled up. She had fallen among friends, and that was sufficient. The window of her room faced south, and since the weather was sunny, and the walls were papered a soft pink, she felt herself in a pleasant and delicate atmosphere. She took a liking to Dr. Alice Keck. The freckled woman had been a cheeky, snub-nosed flapper on long stilts of legs, and her essential impudence had lingered on, and mellowed into a breezy optimism. She had the figure of a boy, and talked like a pseudo-cynical man of forty.