“Yes; it is torture, and you might know it. You ask me to meet your friends because you think it, I suppose, a duty to do so; in truth, you are ashamed of me, you had far rather not see me downstairs. I know myself well enough, and I have glasses in my room. I know what these people say and think of me. I can bear it no longer; I want to leave you! I cannot live with you!”
Isabel could not find words to reply. There was a horrible element of truth in the girls suspicions, though Ada did not and could not know its meaning. It was, indeed, out of mere consideration for her feelings that Isabel was pressing her to show herself.
“You can’t live with me, Ada?” she said at length, in despair that she could not speak with the utterance of true feeling. “Am I unkind to you?”
“You are nothing to me!” was the passionate reply. “Neither kind nor unkind—you are nothing to me, and I am nothing to you! Why did you take me into your house? What interest had you in me? Who am I?”
“Ada, you are the child of a friend of Mr. Clarendon’s. Mr. Clarendon desired that I should take you and bring you up, as you had lost your own parents. That is all I know of you—all.”
“Then you have done your best, and now let me go. We shall never like each other. You took me from a poor home, and I suppose my parents were poor people. It is not in my blood to like you, or to live your life. When I was a child it didn’t matter; but, now I see and understand, I know the difference between us. I will never meet people who look on me with contempt! Let me go. I will be a servant; it is what I am suited for. You can’t keep me against my will, and I wish to leave you!”
For more than an hour Isabel strove against this resolve. Her task was a hard one. By mere cold reasoning she had to face the outburst of a nature which was all at once proving itself so deep and vehement. Could she but have called emotion to her aid! Her own impassiveness was her despair. That Ada should leave her was out of the question, yet by what means could she restrain the girl if the latter proved persistent? She could not tell her the truth; that was something she had put off to an indefinite future, it was beyond her strength to face it as a present necessity. The only appeal she could make was one which it cost her unspeakable self-contempt to utter. To tell Ada that it would be gross ingratitude to make this return to her mother by adoption. Well, what else could be said? The misery of degradation brought the first tears to her eyes.
“You don’t care whether I am grateful or not,” Ada replied, calmer at length, because weak from nervous overstrain. “You care for me less than for your servants. No soul cares for me.”
It was this feeling of desolation which had suddenly taken hold of the developed girl. A heart craving for warmth had come to life within her; her senses had awakened to desperate hunger. The pathos in her last utterance was infinite; it touched Isabel to the core.
“It shall not be so, Ada,” was her answer to the cry. “We will be more to each other; you shall not suffer from loneliness, poor child! I will never ask you to see people you do not wish to, and I will give you all I can of my own life. Be kind and childlike with me. My heart is not hard, dear.”