"Have you forgiven her?" he parried.
She hesitated. "I think I have. I've tried to; but I don't understand her. I can understand doing something—wicked, for love; but not for hate."
He gave his meager laugh. "If forgiveness was a question of understanding, I'm afraid you'd be as hard on her mother as I am."
"On the contrary," she said, vehemently, "if I forgive Elizabeth, it is for her mother's sake." Then she broke out, almost with tears: "Oh, how can you be so unkind as not to go and see the child? The time we need our friends most is when we have done wrong!"
He was silent.
"Sometimes," she said, "sometimes I wish you would do something wrong yourself, just to learn to be pitiful!"
"You wish I would do wrong? I'm always doing wrong! I did wrong when I growled so. But—" he paused; "I believe I have seen Elizabeth," he said sheepishly; "I believe we kissed and made up." At which even poor, sad Helena laughed.
But these two old friends discovered, just as Miss White and Blair's mother had discovered, that life was not over for them, because the habit of friendship persisted. And by and by, nearly a year later, David—even David! began to find a reason for living, in his profession. The old, ardent interest which used to make his eyes dim with pity, or his heart leap with joy at giving help, was gone; he no longer cared to cuddle the babies he might help to bring into the world; and a death-bed was an irritating failure rather than any more human emotion. So far as other people's hopes and fears went, he was bitter or else callous, but he began to forget his humiliation, and he lost his self-consciousness in the serious purpose of success. He did not talk to his mother of the catastrophe of his life; but he did talk of other things, and with the old friendly intimacy. She was his only intimate friend.
Thus, gradually, the little world that loved Elizabeth and Blair fell back, after the storm of pain and mortification, into the merciful commonplace of habit and of duty to be done.
But for Elizabeth and Blair there was no going back; they had indeed fired the Ephesian dome! The past now, to Elizabeth, meant David's message,—to which, finally, she had been able to listen: "Tell her I understand; ask her to forgive me." In Blair's past there was nothing real to which he could return; for him the reality of life had begun with Love; and notwithstanding the bite of shame, the battle with his sense of chivalry, that revolted (now and then) at the thought of holding an unwilling woman as his wife, and the constant dull ache of jealousy, he had madly happy moments that first year of his marriage. Elizabeth was his! That was enough for him. His circumstances, which would have caused most men a good deal of anxiety, were, thanks to his irresponsibility, very little in his thought. There was still a balance at his bank which made it possible, without encroaching on Elizabeth's capital—which he swore he would not do—to live at the old River House "fairly decently." He was, however, troubled because he could not propitiate Elizabeth with expensive gifts; and almost immediately after that interview with his mother, he began to think about an occupation, merely that he might have more money to spend on his wife. "If I could only buy her some jewels!" he used to say to himself, with a worried look. "I want to get you everything you want, my darling," he told her once.