“But Miss Harris,” he protested, “we only—”
“Oh, I’m not talking to you,” she said brutally. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“Certainly, if you say so,” he replied.
There was a moment’s pause. I did not like to look at him. You can bear being insulted if no one else sees it, but one old friend mustn’t witness another’s humiliation, especially when that other is unable by temperament and training to hit back.
Lizzie, having crushed him like an annoying and persistent fly, wheeled toward the door.
“I must go. I can’t stay any longer.” Then in answer to a question from me, “Oh, I don’t know where—out to breathe. I can’t stay still. I want to walk and feel I’m free again, that I’m not cramped up in a dark hole with no sunshine. I want to feel that I’m myself and say it over and over.”
She went out, seeming to draw after her all the stir and color that she had brought in. It was as if a comet with a bright and glittering tail had crowded itself into the room, and then, after trying to squeeze into the contracted area, swishing and lashing about and flattening us against the walls, had burst forth to continue on its flaming way.
I fell back on the sofa feeling that every nerve in me had snapped and I was filled with torn and quivering ends. Stupidly, with open mouth, I looked at Roger, and he, also stupidly but with his mouth shut, looked at me. I don’t know how long we looked. It probably was a few seconds but it seemed an age—one of those artificially elongated moments when, as some sage says, the measure of time becomes spiritual, not mechanical. I saw Roger afar as if I was eying him through the big end of an opera glass—a tiny familiar figure at the end of a great vista. The space between us was filled with a whirling vortex of thoughts, formless and immensely exciting. They surged and churned about trying to find a definite expression, trying to force their way to my brain and tell me thrilling and important news. Then the familiar figure advanced, pressed them out of the way, and taking a chair by the sofa sat down and demanded explanations.
I couldn’t give them. I couldn’t explain Lizzie to him any more than I could to Betty or Mrs. Ashworth. I remembered him, before he had met her, telling me in the restaurant that I was seeing her through my own personality, and now he was doing it, and he’d never get anywhere that way. I wanted desperately to make him understand. There was something so pitiful in his dismay, his reiterated “But why should she be offended with me. What have I done?” And then hanging on my words as if I was some kind of a magician who could wave a wand and make it all clear. Nothing would have pleased me more than to be able to advance some “first cause” from which he could have worked up to a logical conclusion. But how could I? The lost traveler in the Australian bush was faced by a task, simple and easy, compared to Roger Clements’ trying to grasp the intricacies of Lizzie Harris’ temperament.
I was sorry for him. I was sorry (the way you’re sorry for some one inadequately equipped to meet an unexpected crisis) to see how helpless he was. I tried to be kind and also truthful—a difficult combination under the circumstances—and make plain to him some of the less complex aspects of the sphinx, only to leave him in dazed distress.