"If what!" The girl's self-possession broke. "Oh, you are living on the wildest hopes! You must in a place like this. I can see it's terrible to you to be here! But how terrible is it?" In the silence she collected herself. "No, you mayn't want me to know that. Tell me only what can be done."
Greta walked to the window, a strange shambling gait. She looked out and then turned round, but not to face Nan. The strained eyes went carefully all around the room. As she turned sidewise, the gray light fell more merciless on the ravaged face, above all on that patch of discoloration under each eye; no mere violet shadow such as Nan had seen on the faces of the sleepless or the sick. This was as if a muddy thumb had set a deliberate smudge under each eye, and as if the printing of that broad, brown stain had been done with so ruthless a pressure that it had forced in the lower arc of the socket. The eyes made careful circuit of the room. They inspected the ceiling. They scoured the floor. Then Greta bent down and looked at the under side of the table-top. She looked with absorbed attention at the chair before she sat down in it—all signs of mental aberration in the sight of the speechless girl, just as was the loud, toneless voice in which Greta said:
"I suppose they've sent you to get out of me what they've failed to get."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Oh, you don't know what I mean?"
"Greta! Greta!"—the girl dropped into the chair opposite and leaned across the table,—"if I can put away hard feeling and suspicion, can't you? I don't ask you to be friends outside this place. I don't want that any more. But can't you for this little time we have here together just let me help you if I can?"
"How do you propose to help me?"
"It isn't for me to propose how. I don't know what you need."
Again those eyes made circuit of the room.
"What I need?" the hoarse voice repeated. So humped her figure was that it gave her an air of crouching in the chair. The quick turning of the head (all the rest of the body rigid), to look first over one shoulder, then over the other, had in it, taken with the crouching attitude, something animal-like. But the intensity of that listening was not given to the voices in the corridor. Those voices seemed rather to reassure, almost to soothe; for as they sounded nearer, she repeated quietly, "What I need?" Moreover, she looked at Nan as if she really saw her, as if she remembered who she was. "I sha'n't need anything long."