"
They both leaned forward eagerly as she came from her seat; slender,
shapely, every fibre fine and exquisite, no coarse graining from the
dainty head to the dainty foot; the face, clear olive, delicate and
beautiful,--
"The mouth with steady sweetness set,
And eyes conveying unaware
The distant hint of some regret
That harbored there,"--
eyes deep, tender, and pathetic.
"What's this?" said Tom. "Queer. It gives me a heartache to look at
her."
"A woman for whom to fight the world, or lose the world, and be
compensated a million-fold if you died at her feet," thought Surrey, and
said nothing.
"What a strange subject for her to select!" broke in Tom.
It was a strange one for the time and place, and she had been besought
to drop it, and take another; but it should be that or nothing, she
asserted,--so she was left to her own device.
Oddly treated, too. Tom thought it would be a pretty lady-like essay,
and said so; then sat astounded at what he saw and heard. Her face--this
schoolgirl's face--grew pallid, her eyes mournful, her voice and manner
sublime, as she summoned this Monster to the bar of God's justice and
the humanity of the world; as she arraigned it; as she brought witness
after witness to testify against it; as she proved its horrible
atrocities and monstrous barbarities; as she went on to the close, and,
lifting hand and face and voice together, thrilled out, "I look backward
into the dim, distant past, but it is one night of oppression and
despair; I turn to the present, but I hear naught save the mother's
broken-hearted shriek, the infant's wail, the groan wrung from the
strong man in agony; I look forward into the future, but the night grows
darker, the shadows deeper and longer, the tempest wilder, and
involuntarily I cry out, 'How long, O God, how long?'"
"Heavens! what an actress she would make!" said somebody before them.
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