"Yes," she answered, out of her longing. "A woman's loneliness would be less for knowing she was loved."
"What is my sin?" he cried out. "Why should the freedom of other men be always denied to me? I have the same feelings, the same heeds, the same God put them in me. You are so righteous, you teach me my duty; have you no duty towards me? The world mouths the Scriptures that tell us all men are brothers, and persecutes me while it cants. From the time I can remember, it has been so. My own mother was ashamed of me. At school they prayed God to pardon the Jews and the infidels—'Take from them all hardness of heart'—and came out from the Service and beat the 'nigger.' As a man, I have never had a friend. Is it charity, is it justice, to make a pariah of me? Why should I be shunned? I was given life, I didn't ask for it."
"No," she said gently, "but could you bear to have your child say that to you? It is a brutal world, a merciless world. When they tell us it is a beautiful world, they tell a lie. They speak with their eyes shut to everything that is painful to see. When Browning wrote, 'God's in His heaven, all's right with the world,' I think God must have shuddered. I know you believe in a life afterwards where all the crookedness down here will be put straight—all the crooked backs, and things: try to be strong, and wait for the Explanation—and the soul you spoke of. And you've your work to help you; if I could only work like you! I am not 'righteous,' I am not very patient, I have rebelled as passionately as you do; if it can comfort you to know it, I suffer as you do. We are alike, we two—you and I weren't made for happiness."
"Forgive me," said David; "I might have remembered that you suffer. You can understand me.... But you always have understood me." It recurred to him with surprise that from her came the letters that he had treasured. It was difficult to realise that the mind within the bent little woman who seemed a stranger was indeed the one so near to him. Even, as yet, their affinity left him desolate. It was still to Hilda that his spirit turned—Hilda despoiled of all the qualities by which he had justified his love, but sovereign still, still Hilda. "How strange it is," he murmured. "Your letters used to make me very happy. And the letters are real, aren't they? I think I was ready to love her for what she wrote, only——"
"Only then you loved her for herself?"
"Yes.... Vivian will marry her now. Vivian would be glad to know what I know; he is afraid she doesn't care for him. If—if, she wonders whether he loves her, you might tell her that I know he does. I boasted to him yesterday. How he might laugh at me to-day!"
"I'm so sorry for you. It's a worn-out word; it seemed an insult to you when I used it just now, but what other is there? The relief will come. You'll pour your pain into your poetry; you'll write something beautiful and great because of what you're suffering, and know that it is beautiful and great. The pain will fade a little because you'll feel you utter it so well."
He looked beyond her thoughtfully. "Yes," he said.... "It sounds paltry, doesn't it? But it's true. Are we so shallow?"
"We?" she sighed. "I'm not an artist, I am dumb. I used to think—but what has that to do with it!"
"Tell me," he said.