Lorraine got up suddenly, thrusting her hands out before her, as if to ward off some vague fear.
“Hal, you are brutal today. What is the use of talking like that now?... Why did you go to America?... Perhaps if you hadn’t gone—”
“Give me a cigarette,” said Hal, with a little catch in her voice, “I want soothing. At the present moment you’re a greater strain than Dudley talking down at me from a pyramid of worn-out prejudices. I don’t know why my two Best-Belovèds should both be cast in a mould to weigh so heavily on my shoulders.”
Sitting on the table as usual, she puffed vigorously at her cigarette, blowing clouds of smoke, through which Lorraine could not see that her eyes were dim with tears. For Hal’s unerring instinct told her that, at a critical moment, Lorraine had taken a wrong path.
Lorraine, however, was not looking in Hal’s direction. She had moved to the window, and stood with her back to the room, gazing across the Park, hiding likewise misty, tell-tale eyes.
Suddenly, as Hal continued silent, she turned to her with a swift movement of half-expressed protest.
“Hal! you shan’t condemn me, you shan’t even judge me. Probably you can’t understand, because your life is so different—always has been so different; but at least you can try to be the same. What difference has it made between you and me anyhow?... What difference need it make? I have got my chance now, and I am going to be a brilliant success, instead of a struggling beginner. What does the rest matter between you and me?”
“It doesn’t matter between you and me. But it matters to you. I feel I’d give my right hand if you hadn’t done it.”
“How could I help doing it? Oh, I can’t explain; it’s no use. We all have to fight our own battles in the long run—friends or no friends. Only the friends worth having stick to one, even when it has been a nasty, unpleasant sort of battle.”
That hard look, with the hopelessness behind it, was coming back into Lorraine’s eyes. She was too loyal to tell even Hal what her mother had been like the last few months before the critical moment came, and at the critical moment itself. She could not explain just how many difficulties her marriage had seemed a way out from.