Honor paused, her eyes bright with suppressed feeling, and Pixie, keen as ever to appreciate an emotional situation, drew a fluttering breath.
“Yes, yes! How beautiful! How fine! All those lives ... Honor, aren’t you proud?”
“I’ve told you before, my dear. The best part of me is proud and glad, but we’re pretty complex creatures, and I guess a big duty is bound to come up against a pleasure now and then. At the moment I was speaking of, it was one man against three thousand, and the one man weighed down the scale.”
“But ... but I don’t understand.” Pixie puckered her brows in bewilderment. “Why couldn’t you have both?”
“I thought I could, Patricia. I calculated, as my work was full-fledged, and his had hardly begun, that he would be willing to come over with me. It’s a pretty stiff proposition for a woman to run a big show like that, and I’d have been glad of help. He allowed I’d have to sell up and keep house for him in England, and make a splash among the big-wigs to help him in his career. He put it as politely as he knew how, but he made me understand that it was beneath his dignity to live in America and work in pickles, and he guessed if I sold out I could find a buyer who would look after the men as well as or better than I did myself. So—” she waved her small white hands—“there we were! He wouldn’t, and I couldn’t! That’s the truth, Patricia. I could not! I don’t dispute that another person might not manage as well as I, that’s not the question. It’s my work, it’s my responsibility; those men were left to me, and I can’t desert. So the dream’s over, my dear, and I’m going back to real hard life.”
Pixie nodded, the big tears standing in her eyes.
“I should have done the same. He didn’t love you enough.”
Honor gave a quivering laugh.
“He said the same of me. Couldn’t seem to see any difference between the two ‘give-ups’; but there is a difference, Patricia. Well, my dear, that’s the end of it. We said good-bye, and there’s no reason why we should meet again. ... Our lives lie in different places, and it’s no use trying to join them.”
“Honor, dear, are you very unhappy?”