"Po' Miss Mitty has done breck so I 'ouldn't hev knowed her f'om de daid," observed Aunt Euphronasia, when the front door had closed and the sound of rapidly rolling wheels had passed down the street.
All night Sally and I talked of her, she resisting and I entreating that she should go to her old home for the rest of the summer.
"How can I leave you, Ben? How can you possibly do without me?"
"Don't bother about me. I'll manage to scrape along, somehow. There are two things that are killing me, Sally—the fact of owing money that I can't pay, and the thought of your toiling like a slave over my comfort."
"I'll go, then, if you will come with me."
"You know I can't come with you. She only asked me, you must realise, out of pity."
"Well, I shan't go a step without you," she said decisively at last, "for I don't see how on earth you would live through the summer if I did."
"I don't see either," I admitted honestly, looking at her, as she stood in the frame of the long window, the ruffles of her muslin dressing-gown blowing gently in the breeze which had sprung up in the garden. Beyond her there was a pale dimness, and the fresh, moist smell of the dew on the grass.
What she had said was the truth. How could I have lived through the summer if she had left me? Since the night after my failure, when we had come, for the first time, face to face with each other, I had leaned on her with all the weight of my crippled strength; and this weight, instead of crushing her to the earth, appeared to add vigour and buoyancy to her slender figure. Long afterwards, when my knowledge of her had come at last, not through love, but through bitterness, I wondered why I had not understood on that night, while I lay there watching her pale outline framed by the window. Love, not meat and drink, was her nourishment, and without love, though I were to surround her with all the fruits of the earth, she would still be famished. That she was strong, I had already learned. What I was still to discover was that this strength lay less in character than in emotion. Her very endurance—her power of sustained sympathy, of sacrifice—had its birth in some strangely idealised quality of passion—as though even suffering or duty was enkindled by this warm, clear flame that burned always within her.
As the light broke, we were awakened, after a few hours' restless sleep, by a sharp ring at the bell; and when she had slipped into her wrapper and answered it, she came back very slowly, holding an open note in her hands.