I grew more interested in her; I think I may say more worthily interested. I knew what she meant—whom she was thinking of. I passed the narrow yet significant line that divides gossip about people from an interest in one’s friends or a curiosity about the human mind. Or so I liked to put it to myself.
“I must talk,” she said. “Is it very strange of me to talk?”
“Talk away. I hear, or I don’t hear, just as you wish. Anyhow, I don’t repeat.”
“That is your point, you men! Well, if it were between a great man and a nobody?”
“The great man I know—we all do. But the nobody? I don’t know him.”
“Don’t you? I think you do; or perhaps you know neither? If the world and I meant just the opposite?”
She was standing now, very erect, proud, excited.
“It’s a bad thing to mean just the opposite from what the world means,” I said.
“Bad? Or only hard?” she asked. “God knows it’s hard enough.”
“There’s the consolation of the—spoiling,” I suggested. “Who spoils you, the great man or the nobody?”