"Oh no!—no!" she cried. "How impossible!—when one feels oneself so helpless, so clumsy, so useless. Why couldn't I do better? But perhaps it is as well. It all prepares one—braces one—against—"
She paused and leaned forward, looking out at the maze of figures and carriages on the Mansion House crossing, her tight-pressed lips trembling against her will.
"Against the last inevitable disappointment." That, no doubt, was what she meant.
"If you only understood how loth some of us are to differ from you," he cried,—"how hard it seems to have to press another view,—to be already pledged."
"Oh yes!—please—I know that you are pledged," she said, in hasty distress, her delicacy shrinking as before from the direct personal argument.
They were silent a little. Tressady looked out at the houses in Queen Victoria Street, at the lamplit summer night, grudging the progress of the cab, the approach of the river, of the Embankment, where there would be less traffic to bar their way—clinging to the minutes as they passed.
"Oh! how could they put up that woman?" she said presently, her eyes still shut, her hand shaking, as it rested on the door. "How could they? It is the thought of women like that—the hundreds and thousands of them—that goads one on. A clergyman who knows the East End well said to me the other day, 'The difference between now and twenty years ago is that the women work much more, the men less.' I can never get away from the thought of the women! Their lives come to seem to me the mere refuse, the rags and shreds, that are thrown every day into the mill and ground to nothing—without a thought—without a word of pity, an hour of happiness! Cancer—three children left out of nine—and barely forty, though she looked sixty! They tell me she may live eighteen months. Then, when the parish has buried her, the man has only to hold up his finger to find someone else to use up in the same way. And she is just one of thousands."
"I can only reply by the old, stale question," said Tressady, sturdily. "Did we make the mill? Can we stop its grinding? And if not, is it fair even to the race that has something to gain from courage and gaiety—is it reasonable to take all our own poor little joy and drench it in this horrible pain of sympathy, as you do! But we have said all these things before."
He bent over to her, smiling. But she did not look up. And he saw a tear which her weakness, born of shock and fatigue, could not restrain, steal from the lashes on the cheek. Then he added, still leaning towards her:
"Only, what I never have said—I think—is what is true to-night. At last you have made one person feel—if that matters anything!—the things you feel. I don't know that I am particularly grateful to you! And, practically, we may be as far apart as ever. But I was without a sense when I went into this game of politics; and now—"