CHAPTER III
1
They were back on the other side of the closed folding-doors: almost as they had been before, standing together as on an island in artificial twilight. The occasion was not, somehow, one for sitting down.
“I’ve made a great demand on your patience, haven’t I?” she asked him. “All this mystery....”
“But you’ve made it very easy for me to meet that demand,” he told her sincerely.
“And now I’ll explain—something, anyway. You’ve a right to know something—after my strange behaviour.” And she seemed to wait for him to say something, but he had nothing to say: the thing was too mysterious.
“Yes?... Well, listen. There, in that room, lies my oldest and dearest friend—though I don’t know why I put it that way, for I’ve never had another. But it’s not to be pathetic I’m being so expansive to you. And it’s not for grief at Aram’s death. I’m being selfish, my friend. I am thinking only of myself—and there’s a great horror in that word, myself, when there’s not another to put beside it....”
She stopped, and seemed to consider him; and she made a slight, helpless movement of her hand, so that a sense of her impotence touched him closely.
“I’ll understand, whatever you say,” he begged her to believe. “Anyway, I think I will.”
“If you’ve ever been lonely you will,” said Pamela Star. “Though even so it may be difficult, for I’ve only been lonely since seven o’clock this evening. But I am suffering from all the loneliness of my future life, I don’t see how it can be mended. That’s hysteria, maybe. You have met many women, I’m sure, and so you may know this for hysteria....”