“I think a month ago I would either not have believed it or I would have explained it all away to myself. I’d have said he didn’t know what he was doing. He—he was—Oh, there are a dozen excuses I might have made for him.”
“Yes, dozens.”
“But now I don’t make one. I say, ‘Yes, he did it, and he doesn’t even realize how terrible it was.’”
Mrs. Locke glanced at her curiously. “It’s true a good deal has to happen before men and women can treat each other fairly.”
Hildegarde nodded. “I’m beginning to see that. Louis hasn’t begun—not yet. But about other things he’s always been the one who’s helped and taught me. Done it for lots of other people, too, of course,” she hastened to add. “I’d never once thought of him as a person I could help.”
“And now—”
“Now—” Her grave look went as far as that of the blind who seem to descry Truth riding on the viewless air, or sitting on the round world’s uttermost rim. Certainly Hildegarde had been given such extension of vision in these hours that plainly enough she saw that it was not till a cloud settled on Cheviot’s fame that she knew how much its fairness meant to her. Acceptance of that had brought her acquainted with yet another new aspect of experience. Here was a man that had everybody and everything to recommend him—up to yesterday. Since yesterday she knew not only that his nature and his outlook were on one side defective, she had glimpses of a faith that, precisely because of this, he had a need of her beyond the one he had been used to urge. A light shone in the thought that there was something she could do for him that perhaps no other creature could. A perception this of infinite significance to such as Hildegarde Mar, belonging as she did to the bigger of the two camps into which womankind are naturally divided. For, pace the satirists, those of her sex who make most stir in the world and cause most commotion in the hearts of men—those daughters of the horse leech, whose unappeased hunger cries ever “More, more! Give! and give again!” they are in the minority. To the larger, if less striking army, those whose primal passion is to give—of them was Hildegarde.
“It looks as if—for all Louis is so wonderfully clear-headed and I’m so—the other way, there are some things I can see plainer than he. But it seems to me that’s only a reason for”—her voice dropped a little—“for—”