I was ill a long, long while.
Whenever a time came that found me free of fever, able to think again, what could I think except that, even if Betty were dead—there were the others.
The unhappy man had said that always, always there were others.
So I had seen "the need" wrong. The lamp of a young girl's hope, held up in her little world, to help her to find a mate—that light was pale beside the red glare of this fierce demand from men.
And the people who knew least went on saying it wasn't true. And the people who knew most said: there are many thousand "lost sisters" in London.
Who would help me to find mine?—or to sleep once more, knowing Bettina safely dead!
Nothing to hope from the foggy, self-bemused mystic, whose face alternated with that of the nurse in and out of my dreaming and my waking. Long ago she had turned away from service, even from knowledge. There was "no evil, except as a figment of mortal mind." Peace! peace!—and this battle nightly at her gate! Just once her doors burst open, and she was made aware. The sound would soon be faint in her ears, and then would cease.
Who else?
Not her friend, the Healer—whose way of healing was to look away from the wound.
Could I trust even Eric to help? The man who had set his work before his love—who had said: "If all the people in the house were dying, if the house were falling about my ears and I thought I was 'getting it'—I'd let the house fall and the folks die and go on tracking the Secret home." Even if that were not quite seriously meant, no more than all the other good men and true, would that one leave the lesser task and set himself to cure this cancer at the heart of the world.