‘While you were there?’ said Oswald, with a significance in the simple question which covered her face with a sudden blush. Then she blushed deeper still to think what foolish, unpardonable vanity this was—vanity the most extraordinary, the most silly! What he meant, of course, was a simple question, most natural—an inquiry about a fact, not any wicked compliment. How Agnes hated and despised herself for the warm suffusion of shy pleasure which she had felt in her heart and on her face!
‘Yes,’ she said, demurely; ‘but she soon roused up and came quite to herself. She had been in great pain, and they had given her something to deaden it, that was all.’
‘I quite understand,’ he said, with again that appearance of meaning more than he said. No doubt it was merely his way; and it was embarrassing, but not so disagreeable as perhaps it ought to have been. Agnes kept her head down, and slightly turned away, so that this stranger could not see the inappropriate blushes which came and went under the bonnet of the Sisterhood. Then there was a pause; and she wondered within herself whether it would be best to turn down a cross-street and feign an errand, which would take her out of the straight road to the ‘House’—evidently that was his way—and by this means she might escape his close attendance. But then, to invent a fictitious errand would be unquestionably wrong; whereas, to allow a gentleman whom she did not know to walk along the public pavement, to which everybody had an equal right, by her side, was only problematically wrong. Thus Agnes hesitated, in a flutter, between two courses. So long as they were not talking it seemed more simple that he should be walking the same way.
‘What a strange world a hospital must be,’ he said. ‘I have been watching the people coming out’ (‘Then he was not late, after all,’ Agnes remarked to herself), ‘some of them pleased, some anxious, but the most part indifferent. Indifference always carries the day. Is that why the world goes on so steadily, whatever happens? Here and there is one who shows some feeling——’
‘It is because the greater part of the patients are not very ill,’ said Agnes, responding instantly to this challenge. ‘Oh, no, people are not indifferent. I know that is what is said—that we eat our dinners in spite of everything——’
‘And don’t we? or, rather, don’t they? Ourselves are always excepted, I suppose,’ said Oswald, delighted to have set afloat one of those abstract discussions which young talkers, aware of a pleasant faculty of turning sentences, love.
‘Why should ourselves be excepted?’ said Agnes, forgetting her shyness. ‘Why should it always be supposed that we who speak are better than our neighbours? Oh, I have seen so much of that! people who know only a little, little circle setting down all the rest of the world as wicked. Why? If I am unhappy when anyone I love is in trouble, that is a reason for believing that others are so too; not that others are indifferent——’
‘Ah,’ said Oswald, ‘to judge the world by yourself would be well for the world, but disappointing for you, I fear. I am an optimist, too; but I would not go so far as that.’
She gave him a sudden look, half-inquiring, half-impatient. ‘One knows more harm of one’s self than one can know of anyone else,’ she said, with the dogmatism of youth.
He laughed. ‘I see now why you judge people more leniently than I do. What quantities of harm I must know that you could not believe possible! What is life like, I wonder, up on those snowy heights so near the sky?—a beautiful soft psalm, with just a half-tone wrong here and there to show that it is outside heaven——’