She stopped abruptly. She had thought suddenly of Martin. His coming had altered everything. How could she say what she wanted her life to be until her relation to him were settled? Everything depended on that.
This sense of Martin's presence silenced her. "If I can feel," she said at last, "that I can ask your advice. I have nobody ... We all seem ... Oh! how can I make you understand properly! You never will have seen anything like our house. It is all so queer, so shut-up, away from everything. I'm like a prisoner ..."
And that is perhaps what she was like to Mrs. Mark, sitting there in her funny ill-fitting clothes, her anxious old-fashioned face as of a child aged long before her time. Katherine Mark, who had had, in her life, her own perplexities and sorrows, felt her heart warm to this strange isolated girl. She had needed in her own life at one time all her courage, and she had used it; she had never regretted the step that she had then taken. She believed therefore in courage ... Courage was eloquent in every movement of Maggie's square reliant body.
"She could be braver than I have ever been," she thought.
"Miss Cardinal," she said, "I want you to come here whenever you can. You haven't seen our boy, Tim, yet—one and a half—and there are so many things I want to show you. Will you count yourself a friend of the house?"
Maggie blushed and twisted her hands together.
"You're very good," she said, "but ... I don't know ... perhaps you won't like me, or what I do."
"I do like you," said Katherine. "And if I like any one I don't care what they do."
"All the same," said Maggie, "I don't belong ... to your world, your life. I should shock you, I know. You might be sorry afterwards that you knew me. Supposing I broke away ..."
"But I broke away myself," said Katherine, "it is sometimes the only thing to do. I made my mother, who had been goodness itself to me, desperately unhappy."