"No." Justine stood up with a sense of stealing discouragement. "But I don't think I want to be admired——"
"Ah, that's because you know you are!" broke from the depths of the other's bitterness.
The tone smote Justine, and she dropped into the seat at her friend's side, silently laying a hand on Bessy's feverishly-clasped fingers.
"Oh, don't let us talk about me," complained the latter, from whose lips the subject was never long absent. "And you mustn't think I want you to marry, Justine; not for myself, I mean—I'd so much rather keep you here. I feel much less lonely when you're with me. But you say you won't stay—and it's too dreadful to think of your going back to that dreary hospital."
"But you know the hospital's not dreary to me," Justine interposed; "it's the most interesting place I've ever known."
Mrs. Amherst smiled indulgently on this extravagance. "A great many people go through the craze for philanthropy—" she began in the tone of mature experience; but Justine interrupted her with a laugh.
"Philanthropy? I'm not philanthropic. I don't think I ever felt inclined to do good in the abstract—any more than to do ill! I can't remember that I ever planned out a course of conduct in my life. It's only," she went on, with a puzzled frown, as if honestly trying to analyze her motives, "it's only that I'm so fatally interested in people that before I know it I've slipped into their skins; and then, of course, if anything goes wrong with them, it's just as if it had gone wrong with me; and I can't help trying to rescue myself from their troubles! I suppose it's what you'd call meddling—and so should I, if I could only remember that the other people were not myself!"
Bessy received this with the mild tolerance of superior wisdom. Once safe on the tried ground of traditional authority, she always felt herself Justine's superior. "That's all very well now—you see the romantic side of it," she said, as if humouring her friend's vagaries. "But in time you'll want something else; you'll want a husband and children—a life of your own. And then you'll have to be more practical. It's ridiculous to pretend that comfort and money don't make a difference. And if you married a rich man, just think what a lot of good you could do! Westy will be very well off—and I'm sure he'd let you endow hospitals and things. Think how interesting it would be to build a ward in the very hospital where you'd been a nurse! I read something like that in a novel the other day—it was beautifully described. All the nurses and doctors that the heroine had worked with were there to receive her...and her little boy went about and gave toys to the crippled children...."
If the speaker's concluding instance hardly produced the effect she had intended, it was perhaps only because Justine's attention had been arrested by the earlier part of the argument. It was strange to have marriage urged on her by a woman who had twice failed to find happiness in it—strange, and yet how vivid a sign that, even to a nature absorbed in its personal demands, not happiness but completeness is the inmost craving! "A life of your own"—that was what even Bessy, in her obscure way, felt to be best worth suffering for. And how was a spirit like Justine's, thrilling with youth and sympathy, to conceive of an isolated existence as the final answer to that craving? A life circumscribed by one's own poor personal consciousness would not be life at all—far better the "adventure of the diver" than the shivering alone on the bank! Bessy, reading encouragement in her silence, returned her hand-clasp with an affectionate pressure.
"You would like that, Justine?" she said, secretly proud of having hit on the convincing argument.