“You’re a little goose,” Martin said, laughing. “In nine cases out of ten, while you have been torturing yourself, the toothache has stopped, or the poor martyr has shaken off his troubles, and gone off to play golf. We can’t carry other people’s burdens for them, darling, they’ve got to struggle through by themselves. It’s curious with your happy temperament, that you should have such a lurid imagination.”
“No, it isn’t! Not a bit curious.”
“Isn’t it? Why not? I’m interested to hear.”
“Because I imagine happy things as well, stupid, and they come out top. If I worry over other people’s troubles, I glory in their joy. You can’t do one without the other; if you don’t feel one you can’t feel the other. You may never shed a tear in your life over an imaginary woe, but have you ever wakened in the morning and thanked God because the housemaid’s young man had come home from abroad?—Have you ever felt your soul flooded with joy when you saw the sun shining in through pink and white curtains on to a brand-new wall-paper you had just chosen? Did you feel as if you could have jumped over the moon, when the Czarina had a son?”
“I—I was very glad.”
“Well, I wasn’t! I cried with joy, and said my prayers all day long, and thought of her lying there, and hugged the thought of her happiness, the poor, beautiful, tragic thing! What do you do, may I ask, if one of your own friends is in trouble, and doesn’t see the way out?”
“I—er,—well, if I can help him, I invariably do. For my own sake, as well as his. I like helping. Take it all round, it is the most agreeable sensation one can have. If the other fellow feels as light-hearted and generally bucked up afterwards as I do myself, he is jolly well off. But if I can’t—”
“Yes?”
“Well! I don’t worry. What’s the use? It would do him no good for me to be miserable as well as himself.”
“The thought of him doesn’t follow you wherever you go, like a nightmare, squeezing up your heart?”