"I was just thinking about that. My father leaves the choice to me, but----"
The young girl paused, and assumed the same half-thoughtful, half-wrathful expression of face. She seemed to have forgotten Sophie's presence. All of a sudden she asked, her eyes still cast down,
"Would you, if you had been insulted, be the first to offer the hand for reconciliation?"
Sophie was seriously embarrassed by this question, the meaning of which she could easily divine. Helen had never spoken to her about her affairs, not even in allusions. She was not to know anything of them, therefore, and yet it did not suit Helen's candor, and her friendship for Helen, to affect an ignorance and an indifference which were not real.
"That depends," she replied, after a short pause, "on what the offence was, and above all, who was the offending person!"
"How so?"
"There are offences, I think, which only become such by our own making, and offenders who can never be such--who ought never to be such--I mean persons who stand so near to us, with whom we are so closely united by nature, that it would be unnatural, if----"
"They hated us," interrupted Helen, quickly. "But if such a case did occur: if those hated each other for once, who ought to love each other; if they persecuted and warred against each other, who ought to support, help, and bear one another--how then?" Helen had risen; her face was all aglow; her eyes sparkled; her hands were firmly closed--the image of a person rejoicing in combat and prepared for victory or death, but never for surrender.
"I do not know," replied Sophie, affecting a calmness which she did not possess; "I only know that I for my part could never be placed in such a position. I could never hate brother or sister, much less father or mother who gave me life, happen what would. Are they not--myself? And how can one hate one's own self?"
"Are you quite so sure of that?" answered Helen. "How do you know it? You never had brother or sister; your mother died very early; your father has, as you told me yourself, always overwhelmed you with unbounded affection; but I--I have other----"