She was still the example of her own precepts--all outward decorum if not inward composure.
Madelon Hautville, opposite her, in her snow-powdered cloak, with her face like a flash of white fire in her snow-powdered silk hood, seemed in comparison a female of another and an older race.

She might well, from the look of her, have come a nearer and straighter road from the inmost heart of things, from the unpruned tangle of woods and undammed course of streams, from all primitive and untempered love and passion and religion, than this gentlewoman formed upon the models of creeds and scholars.
Madelon looked at the other woman a second with fierce questioning.
Then she sprang up out of the chair where she had been placed, and stood before her on her sofa, and cried out, abruptly, "I have come to tell you about your son.

He is not guilty.

I, myself, stabbed Lot Gordon!" "Please be seated," said Elvira Gordon, and her folded hands in her lap never stirred.
"Seated!" cried Madelon, "seated! How can _you_ be seated, how can you rest a moment--you, his mother?
Why do you not set out to New Salem now--now?
Why do you not walk there, every step, in the snow?
Why do you not crawl there on your hands and knees, if your feet fail you, and plead with him to confess that I speak the truth, and tell them to set him free ?" "I beg of you not to so agitate yourself," said Elvira Gordon.

"You will be ill.