arm, she would plead sudden
fatigue in order that he might take her hand to pull her up hill; if she
picked a wild rose, a thorn would be sure to remain buried in the skin
of her finger, which at some propitious moment would require to be
laboriously removed by one of the male members of the party.

A girl may struggle with fortitude against such a determined dispute for
supremacy; she may deploy her whole strength and even contrive parallel
manoeuvres of her own; but even when she is not less beautiful than
her rival, as was the case with Cleopatra, the more conscious of the two
engaged in such a match is bound in the end to be less happy in her
discoveries, less spontaneous in her inventions, and therefore less
successful in her results. For natural spontaneity is quickly felt and
appreciated by a group of fellow-beings, as is also the element of
vexation and overanxiousness, which Cleopatra was beginning to reveal
despite all her efforts at concealment.

The most unnerving, the most jading, however, of all her self-imposed
performances at this moment, was the constraint to laugh and be merry,
when others laughed and were merry over the frequently empty horse-play
of her sister.

It was this particularly that was beginning to tell against her in the
duel. And as fast as she felt herself losing ground, as surely as she
felt her hold on Denis slackening, the old gnawing sensation at her
heart, which had first been felt years before when Leonetta had ceased
to be a child, would assert itself with hitherto unwonted painfulness,
unprecedented insistence, until it began like a disease to come between
her and her meals, and, worse than all, to engage her attention when she
ought to have been sleeping.

Thus during these wonderful summer days, while all nature was proud with
her magnificent display, while the sun poured down its splendour without
stint upon the homely Kentish coast, Cleopatra, nodding and bowing in
the breeze, like any other flower, fragrant and unhandseled like the
other blooms about her, and voluptuous and seductive like a full-blown
rose, was yet aware of a parasitic germ in her heart that was eating her
life-blood away. To her, alone, in all that party, the warm arms of the
sun brandished javelins, and the calm riches of the landscape concealed
jibes. The meanest field labourer seemed happier than she, the commonest
insect more wanton and more free.

You would have passed her by without noticing that