“It is n't any use,” he answered. “It's too late.”
“It isn't too late. It's never too late. If you won't let me help you, why then perhaps you 'll help me.”
“Help you?”
“Yes—if you knew how miserable it will always make me if we part like this—I shall never cease my regret. Please, tell me a little of what you've felt, of what you 're going to do. It isn't kind to me to leave it like this.”
There was a long silence. She had never before realized how young she was; her inexperience faced her most desperately, so that she felt bitterly that she could not touch even the fringe of his troubles. Every word that she uttered seemed an impertinence and yet she knew that if she went away without speaking she would regret it all her life.
At last he turned round to her; he seemed to have gained absolute control of himself and his voice was quite steady.
“No—I hadn't meant to be rude like that—only you took me by surprise. I've made a wretched muddle of things and, since yesterday afternoon, I 've seen that I'm a complete failure in every possible sense of the word. You are so splendid in all ways—and you are going to have such a splendid life—that we are at the opposite ends of the world, you and I.”
She noticed, whilst he was speaking, that his speech was clear of all its little affectations and pomposities. He seemed another man from the strange creature whom she had known before.
“No, we are not at the opposite ends of the world. I have felt so miserable all this term. I have felt that in some way I ought to have made things better between you and Archie—Mr. Traill—all that wretched quarreling—and yet I felt so helpless.”
“No. That would have been inevitable without you. An older man feeling that he was being jockeyed out of his place by a younger man and the younger man resenting the older man's interference—and neither Traill nor I were, I suppose, very tactful. And there we were pressed up against one another with the whole place working on our nerves. No, you had n't very much to do with it.”