Presently she smiled.
"How kind you are to care so much, to care at all!"
"I do care."
"Are you, will you, be my friend, always?" asked Milly, leaning towards her a little, and the smile seemed to flutter to the other woman like an appealing and grateful kiss.
"I am your friend; I will be your friend, always," Mrs. Drent replied, in an even lower tone than before.
The tears came softly into Milly's eyes while they looked at each other she gently, Mrs. Drent still sombrely. Then leaning back again with a sigh, she continued, "Why I loved him? I didn't love him. Isn't that the almost invariable answer? I was nineteen; I had just left the schoolroom; I was in love with my own ideal of love—you know, you must know, the silly, pathetic, sentimental and selfish mixture one is at nineteen;—and Mamma said that he was that ideal; and he said nothing; so I believed her! Poor Dick! He was in love, I think, really, and not a bit with himself, and with only enough articulateness to ask me to marry him; and of course he was, and is, very good-looking. You know Mamma. She has married us all off very well, they say; you know how they say it. In her determination to ensconce the family type comfortably she is as careless of the single life as nature itself. In this case what appeared to be a very cosy niche offered itself for me and she shoved me into it. I have grown up since then; that is all my story."
"They are terrible, terrible, such marriages," said Mrs. Drent, looking away.
Her tone struck Milly, with all her consciousness of pathos, as perhaps a little misplaced. "Terrible? No, hardly that, I think. I did believe that I loved him. He did love me."
"You were a child who did not know herself, nor what she was doing."
"Yes; that is true."