She smiled gently, thinking how little he knew of the world. “When you've not got your own man to take you, it's difficult. The world moves in pairs. A woman can't go to many places unaccompanied.”
“But surely you don't need to. You must have quantities of friends who would be glad...”
She cut him short. “When a woman is left by herself, she learns a good many things about men that she didn't suspect when she was married. The men she would trust herself with have their wives or fiancées—they have no time to trouble over shipwrecked women like myself. And the other kind of men... The world has no place for a widow. It doesn't mean to be unkind, but it simply doesn't know what to do with her. Unmarried women consider her an unfair rival; they think she's seeking a second chance before they've had their first. In the old days India solved the problem by burying us with our husbands. In England they do the same thing, only less frankly. It's rather stupid to have to live and yet to be treated as though you ought to be dead. One fights against it at first; then one gradually becomes reconciled to be out of the running. If one's wise, she puts all her living into her children.”
“But that's not fair,” he spoke hotly.
“It's the way it happens.”
He sat frowning into the fire. What she had told him had upset all his preconceptions about her. Without looking at her, he re-started the conversation. “I've thought of you as being so happy. I always thought of you that way at the Front. I've pictured you as being perched high on a ledge out of reach of waves and storms. From the first you've given me the feeling that nothing could hurt or move you, and that nothing could hurt or move me while I was near you. It's a queer thing for a man to admit to a woman, but you make me feel absolutely safe.”
“That's not so very queer,” she said, “because that's the way you make me feel.”
“Do I? You're not laughing at me?” He swung round, leaning over the back of the couch, his entire attitude one of amazement.
She met his surprise with a quiet smile. “I'm perfectly serious. But you know the reason why we feel so safe in each other's company? It's because, in our different ways, we're both lonely people. We're not like the rest of the world; we don't move in pairs. I'm lonely because I'm a woman on my own, and you're lonely because you're in hospital in a foreign country. We met just at the time when we could give each other courage.”
“But you don't look lonely,” he protested; “one always thinks of lonely people as being sad and untidy. You always look so terrifically well-groomed and expensive. You create the impression that you're either going to or returning from a party. I never saw you when you weren't self-assured and occupied. I used to wonder how you spared me so much time from your engagements.”