"Kitty," she said, "Do you know, I sometimes think it would be better to sell those books. I can't bear to do it when he gave them to me. But I do believe I ought to. The worst of it is I should have to ask him to do it for me."
"Don't do anything in a hurry, dear. Wait and see," said Kitty cheerfully.
It seemed to Lucia that there was nothing to wait for now. She wondered why Kitty said that, and whether it meant that they thought her worse than they liked to say and whether that was why Sir Wilfrid Spence was coming?
"Kitty," she said again, "I want you to promise me something. Supposing—it's very unlikely—but supposing after all I were to go and die—"
"I won't suppose anything of the sort. People don't go and die of nervous exhaustion. You'll probably do it fifty years hence, but that is just the reason why I won't have you harrowing my feelings this way now."
"I know I've had such piles of sympathy for my nervous exhaustion that it's horrid of me to try and get more for dying, too. I only meant if I did do it, quite unexpectedly, of something else—you wouldn't tell him, would you?"
"Well, dear, of course I won't mention it if you wish me not to—but he'd be sure to see it in the papers."
"Kitty—you know what I mean. He couldn't see that in the papers. He couldn't see it anywhere unless you told him. And if you did, it might make him very uncomfortable, you know."
Poor Kitty, trying to be cheerful under the shadow of Sir Wilfrid Spence, was tortured by this conversation. She had half a mind to say, "You don't seem to think how uncomfortable you're making me." But she forbore. Any remark of that sort would rouse Lucia to efforts penitential in their motive, and more painful to bear than this pitiful outburst, the first in many months of patience and reserve. She remembered how Lucia had once nursed her through a long illness in Dresden. It had not been, as Kitty expressed it, "a pretty illness," and she had been distinctly irritable in her convalescence; but Lucy had been all tenderness, had never betrayed impatience by any look or word.
"I shouldn't mind anything, if only I'd been with him when he was ill. But perhaps he'd rather I hadn't been there. I think it's that, you know, that I really cannot bear."