Sidney had been sitting in a low chair by the fire. She rose with a sudden passionate movement. In the informality of the household, she had visited K. in her dressing-gown and slippers; and now she stood before him, a tragic young figure, clutching the folds of her gown across her breast.
“I worship him, K.,” she said tragically. “When I see him coming, I want to get down and let him walk on me. I know his step in the hall. I know the very way he rings for the elevator. When I see him in the operating-room, cool and calm while every one else is flustered and excited, he—he looks like a god.”
Then, half ashamed of her outburst, she turned her back to him and stood gazing at the small coal fire. It was as well for K. that she did not see his face. For that one moment the despair that was in him shone in his eyes. He glanced around the shabby little room, at the sagging bed, the collar-box, the pincushion, the old marble-topped bureau under which Reginald had formerly made his nest, at his untidy table, littered with pipes and books, at the image in the mirror of his own tall figure, stooped and weary.
“It's real, all this?” he asked after a pause. “You're sure it's not just—glamour, Sidney?”
“It's real—terribly real.” Her voice was muffled, and he knew then that she was crying.
She was mightily ashamed of it. Tears, of course, except in the privacy of one's closet, were not ethical on the Street.
“Perhaps he cares very much, too.”
“Give me a handkerchief,” said Sidney in a muffled tone, and the little scene was broken into while K. searched through a bureau drawer. Then:
“It's all over, anyhow, since this. If he'd really cared he'd have come over to-night. When one is in trouble one needs friends.”
Back in a circle she came inevitably to her suspension. She would never go back, she said passionately. She was innocent, had been falsely accused. If they could think such a thing about her, she didn't want to be in their old hospital.