"Don't. It's a failure, Caroline, and it's right that it should be. I tried to change it, to make it more modern, and I've spoiled it completely. It's neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring."
"Oh, Violet!" Poor Miss Breeze's watery eyes overflowed a little, the tears did not fall, but spread awkwardly, scantily, over her rutted cheeks, and made her plain face even plainer. "I love your books, and I love this one too. If they had let you alone it would have been sweet."
"Yes, but they didn't let me alone, and they were right not to. They weren't unkind, they were right."
There was something innocently pathetic in the little figure by the bed. The plain old felt hat was on one side of her head, and in the strengthening morning light she looked a really old woman—an unhappy, hopeless old woman.
"I'm old-fashioned, Caroline—out of date. That's what it is. These new people—that woman for instance, Beryl J. Bell—she's young, she believes in her books, her mind isn't tired like mine. I know." She rose and moved nervously about the room, speaking in a quick undertone. "I've always known that my books aren't very good of course—not like Hichens, I mean, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and Arnold Bennett—but they were good of their kind, and people did like them, I know they did. I've had letters from people I've never even heard of, showing how much they liked them, and how they had helped them. But now they're old-fashioned even among old-fashioned ones. That's it." She stood still to utter the saddest of cries. "I'm old, Caroline. I'm old."
Poor Caroline Breeze burst into loud snuffling sobs, and rising from her bed, her skimpy nightgown clinging to her bony legs, she embraced her poor friend, and tried to comfort her with love and lies. Violet Walbridge did not cry. She was never a tearful woman, and at this moment was far past such a show of feeling.
"Get back into bed, dear. You'll catch cold," she said gently, patting her friend's bony shoulder. "I must go now or they'll miss me. Come to lunch when you've been to the pawnshop. It's good of you to go. I know I ought to go myself, but somehow I can't, with my own things, and I thought it would not be so bad for you, because you can tell the man that it's for a friend."
This idea she cherished, poor innocent lady, as one of great originality, and to Miss Breeze as well it appeared valuable. But even now, grieved as she was for her friend, it never occurred to the faithful Caroline that the financial situation of "Happy House" could possibly be one of more than temporary tightness.
Mrs. Walbridge never talked of money matters and for all Miss Breeze knew might have a regular income quite apart from her books. So the kind old maid's assumption was that one of the boys had got into a scrape, and that Mrs. Walbridge wished to help him without her husband's knowledge. For, in spite of the fact that Ferdie Walbridge, on the strength of having once paid back ten pounds of his original loan from Miss Breeze, had on several occasions borrowed further small sums of her, to avoid, he said, bothering poor Violet about trifles, Caroline still cherished her pristine belief that husbands were superior beings, who ought not to be troubled by small matters by their wives.
As the friends parted Caroline ventured one question. "There's another book sold to Lubbock & Payne, isn't there? On that last contract, I mean."