“Winifred, my dear child—my dear friend, if you don’t like to be called a child—I wish I understood you; that is at the root of it all. I cannot get at your motives, your way of looking at things.”
Winifred looked up—a frown, not of annoyance but of perplexity, lining her usually unruffled forehead; her blue eyes fixed on Hertha’s face with a touch of appeal which was almost piteous.
“Tell me,” she said, “tell me everything; I do want to know.”
And Miss Norreys did as she asked. She went back to the beginning of their acquaintance, and told her all, as it had affected her herself, as it had taken shape and colour, from her point of view. She spoke as simply as she could, and tried her best to be practical and matter-of-fact. For talking to Winifred was not like talking to Celia, who, young as she was, could take in the sense of a sentence before it was half expressed, who felt the spirit underlying and surrounding even the “commonest” commonplaces of life.
Winifred did not interrupt her. Now and then her colour rose a little; once or twice, as Hertha was not sorry to see, she winced, and seemed on the point of bursting out with some exclamation. And then, when Miss Norreys had come to the end of the first part of her story and stopped, the girl looked up.
“Yes,” she said, “I see how it must have looked to you, and I see, as I certainly did not before, that I was not perfectly ingenuous. To a certain extent I deceived you; at least, I allowed circumstances to deceive you and others, and I was glad of it, because it suited my purpose. But remember I did not start with any intention of deceiving you, and I thought I had a right to take advantage of the mistake when it arose; because, from my point of view, if my work was worth paying for, I had a right to the payment, don’t you see?” and she looked up anxiously.
“Perhaps so, but you had no right to the position, which alone made your earning payment possible. At least, you have no right to obtain it without explaining your circumstances,” said Hertha.
Winifred was silent.
“And,” Hertha went on, though sorry for the mortification she felt that her words must cause, “to tell the truth, I don’t think your work has been exactly worth paying for till now. Everything requires an apprenticeship; part of the idea of this society is to give girls who need to earn their livelihood a chance of fitting themselves to do so, by giving them the necessary apprenticeship gratis, and, more than that, by paying them from the first.”
Winifred grew crimson.