“But—Alfred!” said the frustrate ghost, with something like a gasp.
“I wish you’d explain to me—give me some idea how you do it.... How your mind works,” he went on. “I mean, how can you watch, the way you do, without interfering?”
Many reasons prevented her from telling him that she had very often tried to interfere, and had invariably failed. She was silent for some time, while he waited anxiously for her words.
“I’d been thinking, only last night, that I didn’t help—interfere—nearly enough,” she said, at last. She raised her eyes to his face with a look he had never seen before, a glance troubled and appealing; she was making a heroic struggle for candour with her reticent and uncandid soul. No other living creature had seemed to her so human, so impersonal, so secure, as this young man; she felt that she could say to him as much as her heart would ever permit her to utter. She quite forgot that he was waiting for wisdom from her; she grew pale with the intensity of her desire to hold communion with her kind, to hear the truth without entirely telling it.
“Alfred....” she said. “It seemed to me—I’d wasted my life.”
“By not helping.”
“Well ...” he said, honestly. “Of course there’s a lot that needs doing in the world, and the people with money and leisure—”
“I don’t mean doing anything,” she said, with an impatient little frown. “I mean—influencing. I haven’t tried to influence the people about me.”
He uttered a mild oath of himself. It was startling, to say the least, that she should talk like this, as if she hadn’t heard a word he had spoken—when he had been waiting for the secret of her non-intervention.