Neither she nor her instinct had a word for it. There was cruelty in
it, and, besides cruelty, some quality nameless and unrecognisable,
subtle and secret, and yet crude somehow and vivid. The horror of it
made her forget that he had caught her in one of the most
deplorably humiliating situations in which a young girl can be
caught--deliberately manufacturing smiles for her own amusement.
"You've no business to be here," said the Vicar.
He picked up the broken hand-glass, and as he looked at it the cruelty
and the nameless quality passed out of his face as if a hand had
smoothed it, and it became suddenly weak and pathetic, the face of
a child whose precious magic thing another child has played with and
broken.
Then Alice remembered that the hand-glass had been her mother's.
"I'm sorry I've broken it, Papa, if you liked it."
Her voice recalled him to himself.
"Ally," he said, "what am I to think of you? Are you a fool--or what?"
The sting of it lashed Ally's brain to a retort. (All that she had
needed hitherto to be effective was a little red blood in her veins,
and she had got it now.)
"I'd be a fool," she said, "if I cared two straws what you think of
me, since you can't see what I am. I'm sorry if I've broken your old
hand-glass, though I didn't break it. You broke it yourself."
Carrying her golden top-knot like a crown, she left the room.
The Vicar took the broken hand-glass and hid it in a drawer.
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