Northcote let the hand fall, and recoiled from his mother with a gasp of fear mixed with passion.
The young girl, whom life had done nothing to enlighten, stood in dumb amazement upon the chair on which she was poised.
There was a moment in which the older woman quivered with terror. The brutal eyes of the prostitute, fixed upon her face with a blunt contempt, seemed to change her into stone. Observing her to be petrified like a bird in the presence of a serpent, the woman seated upon the bed picked the row of hairpins from between her teeth with the circumspection of an actress who, upon the stage, is notorious for her power, and who, having a stupendous scene to enact, prepares her audience for it by a display of quietude. She proceeded to coil up her hair with a deliberation that had value as drama.
"Vice-president of the Great Trades' Union," she said, removing the last hairpin from her mouth.
The elder woman stood looking helplessly away. Those indomitable eyes were cowed for the first time in their history. For the first time they had come upon something upon which they had no opinion to deliver. She had barely the strength to carry her gaze to her son, who stood ten paces from her as pale and rigid as a statue.
"Better go—better take Peggy," he whispered in a voice that she did not know to be his.
Margaret, still holding the holly, had come down from the chair, and like a child had come to stand at the side of her natural protectress. She was visibly afraid; and she had clutched the holly so tightly that blood was trickling from the wounds in her soft fingers.
