“Well?” she said.
“I am most abjectly miserable, Photini,” he said, and sat down beside her, staring at the floor.
“You look it, my friend.”
“I suppose so. Photini, I want you to let me stay with you.”
“Stay with me! What the deuce do you mean?”
“Just what I say. There are no words to describe my wretchedness. I am sick of everything and everybody. You, at least, won’t criticise or blame. Your own life has not been so successful that you need censure very harshly the blunders of mine.”
He looked at her drearily, unnotingly, and yet he felt drawn to her by an immense personal sympathy and a kind of remembered affection that nothing could ever quite obliterate.
“Oh, for that, I am not disposed to censure any one but the smug hypocrites, who talk religion and virtue until one longs to fling something in their faces. For the idiots I have a tremendous weakness, I confess.”
“You care a little for me, don’t you, Photini?” Rudolph cried, like a forsaken child.
Photini moved towards him, and gathered him into her arms.