She remembered Agatha and Florence, and she imagined, perhaps, more than they would really have thought of it at home; and so as they turned into Shubarton Place,—for he had kept on all the way along Bridgeley and up Dorset Street with her,—she checked her steps suddenly as they came near the door, and said brusquely,—
"No, Mr. Kincaid; I can't come to the Mission. I might learn A, and teach them that; but how do I know I shall ever learn B, myself?"
He had left his question, as their talk went on, meaning to ask it again before they separated. He thought it was prevailing with her, and that the help that comes of helping others would reach her need; it was for her sake he asked it; he was disappointed at the sudden, almost trivial turn she gave it.
"You have taken up another analogy, Miss Desire," he said. "We were talking about crumbs and feeding. The five loaves and the five thousand. 'Why reason ye because ye have no bread? How is it that ye do not understand?'"
Kenneth quoted these words naturally, pleasantly; as he might quote anything that had been spoken to them both out of a love and authority they both recognized, a little while ago.
But Desire was suddenly sharp and fractious. If it had not touched some deep, live place in her, she would not have minded so much. It was partly, too, the coming toward home. She had got away out of the pure, clear spaces where such things seemed to be fit and unstrained, into the edge of her earth atmosphere again, where, falling, they took fire. Presently she would be in that ridiculous pink room, and Glossy Megilp would be chattering about "those lovely purple poppies with the black grass," that she had been lamenting all the morning she had not bought for her chip hat, instead of the pomegranate flowers. And Agatha would be on the bed, in her cashmere sack, reading Miss Braddon.
"It would sound nice to tell them she was going down to the Mission School to give out crumbs!"
Besides, I suppose that persons of a certain temperament never utter a more ungracious "No," than when they are longing all the time to say "Yes."
So she turned round on the lower step to Kenneth, when he had asked that grave, sweet question of the Lord's, and said perversely,—
"I thought you did not believe in any brokering kind of business. It's all there,—for everybody. Why should I set up to fetch and carry?"