Standing there, he faced himself and saw that, whether for good or evil, Life for him had always been evasive, fluid, a thing grasped at but never caught.
Rachel was not for such as he—
Lizzie had watched him and her face had grown very tender—"I know I'm a nuisance just now," she said—"it hasn't, naturally, been a very pleasant thing for me to have to do—but I thought that I could tell you a little about her—I've seen her through all of this."
He strode along fiercely, his eyes staring in front of him; he looked, she thought, like a boy who had been forbidden some longed-for pleasure; she found it difficult to keep pace with him.
"She's so very, very young," Lizzie went on, "I expect you forget that—she's filled, above everything else, with a determination to express her own individuality, a protest, you know, against its having been squashed by her family.
"Anything that helps her to express it she seizes on. You helped her—she seized on you. Now all her heart is stirred by this disaster to her husband, the most active person she's ever known absolutely helpless, so now that has seized her. She can't have two things in her mind at once—that's where her troubles come from—she cares for you. You'll always be something to her that no one else can ever be, and oh! it's so much better, so much, much better, than if you'd gone off, made a mess of it all, spoilt all your beautiful ideas of one another."
The thrill in her voice made him, even though he was intensely concerned with his own wrongs and losses, consider her. What Lizzie Rand was this? It flung him back, almost against his will, as though he hated to throw over all the ideas he had formed of her, to that first meeting when they had stood at the window and looked out on the grey square and he had called it the Pool. Then he had suspected her of emotion and sentiment; it was afterwards, when he had made her his wise Counsellor and common-sense Adviser, that he had thought of her as unemotional.
He felt now that he had been treating her rather badly. He stopped abruptly and looked down at her; there was something in her earnest gaze at him, something rather nervous and hesitating that did not belong at all to the efficient Miss Rand.
"It is good of you, Miss Rand, to have come and given me this note. I'm finding it all rather difficult at the moment, as I'm sure you'll understand. I'd better go off somewhere by myself a bit, I think, but it was good of you." He broke off and stared desolately about him. He was not very far from tears, she thought.
She too remembered their first meeting. She had found him melodramatic then, a little insincere—Now she knew that she had been wrong. He was sincere as a child is sincere; the world was utterly black, was transcendently bright as it was for a child.