“On the Karroo,” Esmé answered, surprised. “Why?”
“I didn’t know. I thought perhaps you might meet at the Zuurberg.”
“No. He left there long ago.”
“Well, but he might have felt it worth his while to go back when you were there. I don’t understand that affair, Esmé. I don’t trust the man. My dear, I don’t trust him. And you are wearing yourself out, thinking of him. You are losing your vitality. You aren’t as pretty as you were. No.” She surveyed the girl fixedly with adversely criticising eyes. “You are not so pretty.”
This came as a shock to Esmé. She wanted to look in the glass over the mantelpiece; but her sense of dignity and the fitness of things kept her glued to her seat. What, after all, did it matter if her looks departed? There was no one to note these things nor feel distressed on their account.
“Why does he continue to write to you, and never come to see you?” Rose asked. “It’s not fair to you. And there’s George... If it wasn’t for Paul Hallam you would marry George. He is a good fellow, and he’s getting on. It would be a most suitable arrangement. You don’t want to teach all your life. You want a home. Every woman does. Instead you fill your head with romantic nonsense, and make yourself miserable, and George miserable—for a man who doesn’t care. You could forget him if you left off corresponding. Why do you let him play with you?”
“He doesn’t play with me,” Esmé answered, flushing. “He never asked me for anything more than friendship. I give him that because it is a help to him, and because he is lonely. Why cannot a man and a girl be friends?”
“I should have thought your own case furnished an answer to that,” Rose said. “In a friendship between a man and a girl one of them invariably falls in love. You can’t get away from nature. The eternal question of sex hides behind all these unequal friendships. That’s what makes them interesting. But these interesting relationships can spoil one’s life. I wish that you had never met this man. I feel uneasy about it.”
Esmé sat in an attitude of disturbed attention, and kept her eyes studiously averted from her sister’s. There was just sufficient reason in her discursive statements to cause the girl to wince mentally. She was beginning to believe that she was giving more than Paul Hallam wanted from her, more than he dreamed of when he proposed continuing the friendship. This thought was humiliating; but only temporarily so: even as she felt its sting another thought drew the venom from it. If she could help him, even a little, it was worth while.