“I’ll say it in any way you like,” answered Hester, hardly. “It seems to me that we’re just as good friends as ever. I see no difference.”
“I do,” answered Katharine. “And there’s always going to be a difference, now,” she added, regretfully.
She was conscious that in some unaccountable way the positions had been reversed with regard to her character and her friend’s. It should naturally have been the more passionate, expansive, sensitive woman who should be almost begging that the old friendship might not be forgotten, and Katharine herself, the colder of the two, the one by far less easily carried away by passing emotions, should have been giving the assurance that nothing was changed. It was incomprehensible to her, as well it might be, since there was a cause for Hester’s behaviour which lay very far from the question of money, though the coldness which the latter had caused was helping to make matters worse.
“I suppose we’re outgrowing each other,” suggested Hester, who was more or less anxious to account for the change, since Katharine was laying such great stress upon it. “You know that’s the way of the world,” she added, tritely. “People are ever so fond of each other for a long time, and then all at once they find out that they’re not what they were, you know, and that they don’t really care.”
“Oh—do you look at it in that way?” Katharine’s voice and manner changed, for she was hurt. “But don’t you think this outgrowing, as you call it, has been rather sudden? It’s only about three weeks since we were talking quite differently. It can’t be more, I’m sure.”
“Isn’t it?” asked Hester, indifferently. “Really, it seems ever so long since we sat here and told each other things.”
There is a beautiful vagueness about the language of a woman when she wishes to have something forgotten.
“It seems long to me, too,—in another way,” answered Katharine. “It’s far off—like a good many things that happened then.”
Hester made no answer to this remark, but leaned back against her cushion and meditatively nibbled the edge of a ginger-snap.
“Of course,” said Katharine, “if you want it all to end here, I’m not going to cry and behave like the schoolgirl you talked about—”