She spoke in a yet lower tone as she went on, somewhat ill at ease from the intimacy of her confession:
"We girls have to make a show of being what we are not. It's easier that way for us to forget our real selves: we seem to become somebody else. I even go so far as not to blame the girl I was yesterday for all that makes me the girl I am today."
She was silent awhile, apparently searching her memory.
"Why do you try so hard to forget?" asked Monsalvat, "Wouldn't it be better to remember—if the present is so sad?"
"Sad? No, it isn't sad. Other people might think so. But really it isn't. It is worse than that rather: it is empty, without any feeling at all. We live in a sort of perpetual confusion. It's almost like not knowing whether you're alive or not."
"But why not remember what is good in the past? Why not dream?"
"Remember?" Her expression suggested that a world full of past sufferings had taken possession of her imagination.
"Why remember? Just to feel bad?"
"Yes, little friend, to feel, and to suffer. If you didn't suffer, you would be horrible, all of you. It is because you suffer that you deserve pity and sympathy; and so you ought to seek out pain, and treasure it."
Nacha raised her hands to her face. In his own trouble, and in the compassion Nacha aroused in him, Monsalvat began to feel a kind of satisfaction. If she could still feel so deeply, there was hope.