"Yes," said Gusta, "thank you, I--"
She blushed to her throat. They stood there in the middle of that common prison; a sudden constraint lay on them. Elizabeth, conscious of the difficulty of the whole situation, and with a little palpitating fear at being in a prison at all--a haunting apprehension of some mistake, some oversight, some sudden slip or sliding of a bolt--did not know what to say to Gusta now that she was there. She felt helpless, there was not even a chair to sit in; she shuddered at the thought of contact with any of the mean articles of furniture, and stood rigidly in the middle of the room. She looked at Gusta closely; already, of course, with her feminine instinct, she had taken in Gusta's dress--the clothes that she instantly recognized as being better than Gusta had ever before worn--a hat heavy with plumes, a tan coat, long and of that extreme mode which foretold its early passing from the fashion, the high-heeled boots. Her coat was open and revealed a thin bodice with a lace yoke, and a chain of some sort. An odor of perfume enveloped her. The whole costume was distasteful to Elizabeth, it was something too much, and had an indefinable quality of tawdriness that was hard to confirm, until she saw in it, somehow, the first signs of moral disintegration. And this showed in Gusta's face, fuller--as was her whole figure--than Elizabeth remembered it, and in a certain coarseness of expression that had scarcely as yet gone the length of fixing itself in lines. Elizabeth felt something that she recoiled from, and her attitude stiffened imperceptibly. But not imperceptibly to Gusta, who was a woman, too, and had an instant sense of the woman in Elizabeth shrinking from what the woman in her no longer had to protect itself with, and she felt the woman's rush of anger and rebellion in such a relation. But then, she softened, and looked up with big tears. She had a sudden yearning to fling herself on Elizabeth's breast, but leave was wanting, and then, almost desperately, for she must assert her sisterhood, must touch and cling to her, she seized Elizabeth's hand and held it.
"Oh, Miss Elizabeth," she said, "I oughtn't to 'av' sent for you. I know I had no right; but you was always good to me, and I had no one. I've done nothing. I've done nothing, honest, honest, Miss Elizabeth, I've done nothing. I don't know what I'm here for at all; they won't tell me. And Archie, too, it must have something to do with him, but he's innocent, too. He hasn't done nothing either. Won't you believe me? Oh, say you will!"
She still clung to Elizabeth's hand, and now she pressed it in both her own, and raised it, and came closer, and looked into Elizabeth's face.
"Say you believe me!" she insisted, and Elizabeth, half in fear, as though to pacify a maniac, nodded.
"Of course, of course, Gusta."
"You mean it?"
"Surely I do."
"And you know I'm just as good as I ever was, don't you?"
"Why--of course, I do, Gusta." It is so hard to lie; the truth, in its divine persistence, springs so incautiously to the eyes before it can be checked at the lips.