Her tears were dropping on my bosom. But could I answer that I was her friend? I did not wish to be her enemy; she and Frank and I were dolls in the great hands of fate, irresponsible, guiltless, meet for an understanding sympathy. Why was I not still her friend? Did not my heart bleed for her? Yet such is the power of convention over honourableness that I could not bring myself to reply directly, ‘Yes, I am your friend.’
‘We have known each other a long time,’ I ventured.
‘There was no one else I could come to,’ she said.
Her whole frame was shaking. I sat up, and asked her to pass my dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders. Then I rang the bell.
‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded fearfully.
‘I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and then we will talk.
Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair. You’ll be more yourself after a cup of tea.’
How young I was then! I remember my naïve satisfaction in this exhibition of tact. I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be—hard in spite of the compassion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for her. And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one, defenceless as a rabbit.
‘You are very kind to me,’ she said, putting her cup on the mantelpiece with a nervous rattle; ‘and I need it.’
‘Tell me,’ I murmured. ‘Tell me—what I can do.’