“People are such fools,” she whispered. I nodded, still staring at the points of light. I had looked at them so long that they almost hypnotized me. It was really difficult to look away.
She spoke abruptly next, and loud. “You were right,” she said, “in what you said that day. I have been fretful and cross and my standards have been wrong. And--all the wrongness of them is hurting me now. . . .” Then, with gaps and funny interludes of the old, critical, little part of Evelyn, she told me that Herbert Apthorpe didn’t like her any more, that he had been hurt by her not being willing to marry him because she considered him poor, and that he hadn’t answered a note in which she said she was sorry.
“I saw him,” she ended, “last week with Charlotte Brush, I suppose----” Then her voice trailed off as she stared up at the ceiling. Her arms were above her head and her hair spread all over the pillow in heavy chestnut waves.
“He must care,” I said, getting up and coming over to sit on the bed.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because you are so beautiful,” I answered, “and your spirit would be too, if you’d let it. You are dear when you want to be.”
“Do you think so?” she asked with interest, as she turned her eyes on me. I was afraid she would be annoyed, but she wasn’t.
“Why lately,” I said, “no one could have been more lovely----”
“Not to you,” she answered.
I said I didn’t blame her, that I had been presuming and I knew it. For I had.