"Do you think I would not give the world to be able to love?" she said. "Do you think I send Hugh marching through hell for fun? You say I am heartless, as if it was my fault! Would you go to a blind man in the street and say, 'You beast, you brute, why don't you see?' Is he blind for fun? Am I like this for fun?"
She got up from her seat and came and stood in front of Edith, flushed with an unusual color, and continued more rapidly yet, emphasizing her points by admirable gesticulations of her hands. Indeed they seemed to have speech on their own account: they were extraordinarily eloquent.
"Do you know you make me lose my temper?" she said. "That is a rare thing with me; I seldom lose it; but when I do it is quite gone, and I don't care what I say, so long as it is what I mean. For the minute my temper is absolutely vanished, and I shall make the most of its absence. Who are you to judge and condemn me? and give me rules for conduct, how work and love are the only things worth doing? What do you know about me? Either you are absolutely ignorant about me, or so stupid that the very cabbages seem clever by you. And you go telling me what to do! And what do you know about love? To look at you, as little as you know about me. Yes; no wonder you sit there with your mouth open staring at me, you and your foolish, great fat-bellied bloated violin. You are not accustomed to be spoken to like this. It never occurred to you that I would give the world to be able to love as Jill and Polly and Mary and Minnie love. I do not go about saying that any more than a cripple calls attention to his defect: he tries to be brave and conceal it. But that is me, a dwarf, a hunchback, a crétin of the soul. That is the matter with me, and you are so foolish that it never occurred to you that I wanted to be like other people. You thought it was a pose of which I was proud, I think. There! Now do not do that again."
Nadine paused, and then sighed.
"I feel better," she said, "but quite red in the face. However, I have got my temper back again. If you like I will apologize for losing it."
Edith jumped up and kissed Nadine. When she intended to kiss anybody she did it, whether the victim liked it or not.
"My dear, you are quite delightful," she said. "I thoroughly deserve every word. I was utterly ignorant of you. But I am not stupid: if you will go on, you will find I shall understand."
Suddenly Nadine felt utterly lonely. All she had said of herself in her sudden exasperation was perfectly genuine, and now when her equanimity returned, she felt as if she must tell somebody about this isolation, which for the moment, in any case, was sincerely and deeply hers. That she was a girl of a hundred moods was quite true, but it was equally true that each mood was authentically inspired from within. Many of them, no doubt, were far from edifying, but none could be found guilty of the threadbare tawdriness of pose. She nodded at Edith.
"It is as I say," she said. "I hate myself, but here I am, and here soon will Hugh be. It is a disease, this heartlessness: I suffer from it. It is rather common too, but commoner among girls than boys."