Elisabeth was the last woman to despise flattery of this sort; an appeal for help of any kind never found her indifferent.
"What have you been doing?" she asked gently.
"It isn't so much what I have been doing as what I have been feeling. I found myself actually liking Lady Silverhampton, simply because she is a countess; and I was positively rude to a man I know, called Edgar Ford, because he lives at the East End and dresses badly. What a falling-off since the days when you and I worshipped the gods together at Philæ, and before money and rank and railways and bicycles came into fashion! Help me to be as I was then, dear friend."
"How can I?"
"By simply being yourself and letting me watch you. I always feel good and ideal and unworldly when I am near you. Don't you know how dreadful it is to wish to do one thing and to want to do another, and to be torn asunder between the two?"
Elisabeth shook her head. "No; I have never felt like that. I can understand wanting to do different things at different times of one's life, but I can not comprehend how one person can want to do two opposing things at the same time."
"Oh! I can. I can imagine doing a thing, and despising one's self at the time for doing it, and yet not being able to help doing it."
"I have heard other people say that, and I can't understand it."
"Yet you are so complex; I should have thought you would," said Farquhar.
"Yes, I am complex; but not at the same moment. I have two distinct natures, but the two are never on the stage at once. I don't in the least know what St. Paul meant when he said that the evil he would not that he did. I can quite understand doing the evil on Tuesday morning that I would not on Monday afternoon; but I could never do anything and disapprove of it at the same minute."