"I mean—just that."
Lois clasped the girl's hands desperately. "But, Rosie, you must live. Life has a great deal in store for you still—perhaps a great deal of happiness. They say that life never takes anything from us for which it isn't prepared to give us compensation, if we'll only accept it in the right way."
Rosie shook her head. "I don't want it."
Lois tried to reach the dulled spirit by another channel. "But we all have disappointments and sorrows, Rosie. I have mine. I've great ones."
The aloofness in Rosie's gaze seemed to put miles between them. "That doesn't make any difference to me. If you want me to be sorry for them—I'm not. I can't be sorry for any one."
In her desire to touch the frozen springs of the girl's emotions, Lois said what she would have supposed herself incapable of saying. "Not when you know what they are?—when you know what one of them is, at any rate!—when you know what one of them must be! You're the only person in the world except myself who can know."
Rosie's voice was as lifeless as before. "I can't be sorry. I don't know why—but I can't be."
"Do you mean that you're glad I have to suffer?"
"N-no. I'm not glad—especially. I just—don't care."
Lois was baffled. The impenetrable iciness was more difficult to deal with than active grief. She made her supreme appeal. "And then, Rosie, then there's—there's God."