“You mean....”
“Oh, I mean simply to give him up.”
Again Olivia was silent, and Sabine asked suddenly, “Have you had a call from a Mr. Gavin? A gentleman with a bald head and a polished face?”
Olivia looked at her sharply. “How could you know that?”
“Because I sent him, my dear ... for the same reason that I’m here now ... because I wanted you to do something ... to act. And I’m confessing now because I thought you ought to know the truth, since I’m going away. Otherwise you might think Aunt Cassie or Anson had done it ... and trouble might come of that.”
Again Olivia said nothing; she was lost in a sadness over the thought that, after all, Sabine was no better than the others.
“It’s not easy to act in this house,” Sabine was saying. “It’s not easy to do anything but pretend and go on and on until at last you are an old woman and die. I did it to help you ... for your own good.”
“That’s what Aunt Cassie always says.”
The shaft went home, for it silenced Sabine, and in the moment’s pause Sabine seemed less a woman than an amazing, disembodied, almost malevolent force. When she answered, it was with a shrug of the shoulders and a bitter smile which seemed doubly bitter on the frankly painted lips. “I suppose I am like Aunt Cassie. I mightn’t have been, though.... I might have been just a pleasant normal person ... like Higgins or one of the servants.”
The strange speech found an echo in Olivia’s heart. Lately the same thought had come to her again and again—if only she could be simple like Higgins or the kitchen-maid. Such a state seemed to her at the moment the most desirable thing in the world. It was perhaps this strange desire which led Sabine to surround herself with what Durham called “queer people,” who were, after all, simply people like Higgins and the kitchen-maid who happened to occupy a higher place in society.