She looked at him with a shade more colour in her face as though she was grateful for his vehemence.
“I can’t really see any object in it, myself, but from their point of view it’s—it’s self-sacrifice, and so it becomes desirable.”
“To propitiate a Being whom they call the God of Love?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know. You see,” said Rosamund, “it’s only the personal application that matters to me. Cousin Bertha says I am very egotistical, and I think it’s true. Nothing seems to matter to me at all, except just Frances and me, now. Nothing else seems in the least real. Once I thought something else was, but it was only a mistake. It didn’t really get down to bedrock at all—not half so much as with one little-finger-ache of Frances.’ I suppose everyone has something which is realest in the world, besides which other things simply don’t count.”
“That’s quite true,” said Ludovic, wondering if it was a relief to her to talk. “The true secret of life has always seemed to me to lie in the focussing of that one especial thing which is the most real to each of us. So many people don’t know what it is, or they may know, and wilfully blind themselves because it is contrary to a conventional ideal.”
“I would much rather have thought that Morris had broken my heart and spoilt my whole life, than that he was merely an incident,” murmured Rosamund, as though to herself. “That was a conventional ideal.”
Ludovic was struck by the fundamental sincerity of her outlook. He looked at her tired, downcast face and said nothing.
“But now,” she told him, gazing straight at him, “I know that nothing in my life has mattered at all, so far except just Frances and the ordinary primitive facts of our being sisters, and having been children together.”
“I think,” said Ludovic gently, “that the ordinary primitive facts are the ones that one does come back to in the long run, always, as the things that matter most.”
“Frances hasn’t.”