“I want to atone to you for the gruesome mood that I was in when I went to see you yesterday. If you’ll invite me again, I will be different—and, oh, by the way, I’ve got over that foolish idea that I had about not meeting your brother. If it would give you any pleasure, I don’t in the least object. It would certainly be very silly to let him spoil this beautiful chance of our being together, as it would if I refused to meet him.”
Martha looked at her in surprise. She had so entirely made up her mind that the powers had decreed that these two beings should not meet that Sonia’s words rather disconcerted her.
“Oh, are you not pleased?” said the latter, disappointedly. “I thought it would delight you.”
“So it does,” said Martha, quickly; “but, to be perfectly frank, I had so entirely accepted the idea that there might be some unknown danger in a meeting between you two that I had given it up; and now that the likelihood of it comes again, some sense of danger comes with it. You both seem such tremendous forces—in my eyes, at least,—that it is not like any ordinary acquaintanceship. It is very foolish, though; for even two locomotives may rush toward each other without danger, if each is solid on its own track, leading to its different destination. And surely no harm is done when they come very close, and exchange signals of friendliness, and then part, and go their opposite ways.”
“Perfectly sage and true! Most wisely spoken!” said Sonia. “So you are reconciled now, are you? What weathercocks we women are! I am sure I may say it of you as well as of myself, contrasting your former eagerness with your present reluctance for this meeting. Well, I suppose it’s a part of our nature, and I don’t know that men are so very different.”
“Harold is different,” said Martha.
“Oh, no doubt he is quite, quite the immaculate,” said her friend, lightly; and then, with a sudden change, she added in tones of extreme earnestness:
“Martha, you have never told him one word about me—have you? Nothing, I mean, of what I have told you or let you see concerning myself. All that was and must remain sacred between you and me.”
“Not a word, not a syllable!” cried Martha. “How could you even ask? He knows of you only as my atelier friend, and that you are a Russian princess, and he knows of my visits to you, and my love and admiration for you; but not one word of what your confidence has taken me into about yourself personally. I told him how little I knew or cared to know about you—that you were a young and beautiful widow, whose past history was wholly unknown to me. What you have let me see of the writing which that history has made upon your heart was a sacred confidence which no power could ever draw out of me.”
“I knew it, dear. I never doubted it. Don’t defend yourself, as if I had distrusted you. It is because I do trust you that I consent to meet your brother. I would certainly not willingly make the acquaintance of any man who could possibly be supposed to know as much of my heart and its weaknesses as I have revealed to you.”