Then suddenly she began to cry, because at such a moment the loss of the cakes was truly a disaster and the thought of Queenie alone without food waiting here for her to return from Bucharest was too much after the strain of the afternoon. She caught the child to her heart and told the story of what had happened with Florilor.
"Now do you understand?" she asked, fiercely. "Now do you understand how much I want you never—but never, never again—even so much as to think of the possibility of selling yourself to a man? You must always remember, when the temptation comes, what I was ready to do for you to prevent such a horror. You must always believe that I am your friend and that if the war goes on for twenty years I will never leave you. You shall come back to England with me. With the money that I'm going to borrow in Bucharest we'll get as far as Greece, anyway. But whatever happens, I will never leave you, child, because I bear on my heart the stigmata of what I was ready to do for you."
"I was not understanding much of what you are talking," Queenie sighed.
"There is only one thing to understand—that I love you. You see this golden bag? The man who gave it to me left inside it a part of his soul; and if he has been killed, if he is lying at this moment a dreadful and disfigured corpse, what does it matter? He lives forever with me here. He walks beside me always, because he obeyed the instinct of pure love. For you I was ready to do an action to account for which, when I search deep down into myself, I can find no motive but love. You must remember that and let the memory of that walk beside you always. Let me go on talking to you. You need not understand anything except that I love you and that I must not lose you. I shall be thinking of you to-morrow when I'm in Bucharest, and I shall eat nothing all day, because I could not eat while you are waiting here hungry. It won't be for long. I shall be back to-morrow night with money. You don't mind my leaving you? And promise me, promise me that you won't unlock your door for a moment. Don't let that horrible youth have his way when I'm gone for the sake of a lunch. You won't, will you? Promise me, promise me."
"Of course I would never do anything with him," Queenie said.
Sylvia held up the ten-franc piece.
"Isn't it a wonderful little coin?" she laughed. "It will take us so far from here. Once when I was a very small girl I found just such another."
"You were being a small girl long ago," Queenie exclaimed. "Fancy! I was always forgetting that anybody else except me was ever being small."
"What a lonely world she lives in," Sylvia thought. "She is conscious of nothing but herself, which is what makes her desire to be English such a tragedy, because she is feeling all the time that she has no real existence. She is like a ghost haunting the earth with incommunicable desires."
Sylvia passed away the supperless evening for Queenie by telling her stories about her own childhood, trying to instil into her some apprehension of the continuity of existence, trying to populate the great voids stretching between her thoughts that so terrified her with the idea of being lost. Queenie really had no conception of her own actuality, so that at times she became positively a doll, dependent upon the imagination of another for her very life. In the present stage of her development she might be the plaything of men without suffering; but Sylvia was afraid that if she again exposed her to the liability by deserting her at this point, Queenie might one day suddenly wake up to a sense of identity and find herself at the moment in a brothel. People always urged in defense of caging birds that if they were caged from the nest they did not suffer. Yet it was hard to imagine anything more lamentable than the celestial dreams of a lark that never had flown. Sylvia knew that at least she had been able to frame clearly the fear she had for Queenie; it lent new strength to her purpose. The horror of the brothel had become an obsession ever since earlier in the year she had passed by a vast and gloomy building which seemed a prison, but which she had been told was the recognized pleasure-house of soldiers. In this building behind high walls were two hundred women, most of whom in a Catholic country would have been cherished as penitents by nuns. Instead of that they were doomed to expiate their first fault by serving the state and slaking the lust of soldiers at the rate of a franc or a franc and a half. These women were fed by the state; they were examined daily by state doctors; everybody agreed that such forethought by the state was laudable. People who protested against such a debasement of womanhood were regarded as sentimentalists: so were people who believed in hell.