Esther had no answer to make. Yet she could take refuge in a perfect humility, and this she did.
"I ask you, Jeff," she said. "I ask you to come back."
The world itself seemed to close about him, straiter than the walls of the room. Had he, in taking vows on him when he truly loved her, built a prison he must dwell in to the end of his life or hers? Did moral law demand it of him? did the decencies of Addington?
"I ask you to forgive me," said Esther. "Are you going to punish me for what I did?"
"No," said Jeff, in a dull disclaimer. "I don't want to punish you."
But he did not want to come back. This her heart told her, while it cautioned her not to own she knew.
"I shouldn't be a burden on you," she said. "I should be of use, social use, Jeff. You need all the pull you can get, and I could help you there, tremendously."
The same bribe Madame Beattie had held out to him, he remembered, with a sorry smile. Esther, Madame Beattie had cheerfully determined, was to help him placate the little gods. Now Esther herself was offering her own abetment in almost the same terms. He saw no way even vaguely to resolve upon what he felt able to do, except by indirection. They must consider it together.
"Esther," he said, "sit down. Let me, too, so we can get hold of ourselves, find out what we really think."
They sat, and she clasped her hands in a way prayerfully suggestive and looked at him as if she hung on the known value of his words. Jeff groped about in his mind for their common language. What had it been?—laughter, kisses, the feverish commendation of the pageant of life. He sat there frowning, and when his brow cleared it was because he decided the only way possible was to open the door of his own mind and let her in. If she found herself lonesome, afraid even in its furnishings as they inevitably were now, that would tell them something. She need never come again.