“I have been nearly mad. I haven’t slept for weeks!” She knit her little hands together, till the jewelled rings almost cut into the fingers. “He is everything to me; there is nothing else in the world. You, who are so great, and strong, and clever, and who care only for your work, and for men as your friends, you cannot understand what it is when one person is everything to you, when there is nothing else in the world!”
“And what do you want me to do?”
“Oh, I don’t know!” She looked up. “A woman knows what she can do. Don’t tell him that I love him.” She looked up again. “Just say something to him. Oh, it’s so terrible to be a woman; I can’t do anything. You won’t tell him exactly that I love him? That’s the thing that makes a man hate a woman, if you tell it him plainly.”
“If I speak to him I must speak openly. He is my friend. I cannot fence with him. I have never fenced with him in my own affairs.” She moved as though she were going away from the fireplace, then she turned and said: “Have you thought of what love is between a man and a woman when it means marriage? That long, long life together, day after day, stripped of all romance and distance, living face to face: seeing each other as a man sees his own soul? Do you realize that the end of marriage is to make the man and woman stronger than they were; and that if you cannot, when you are an old man and woman and sit by the fire, say, ‘Life has been a braver and a freer thing for us, because we passed it hand in hand, than if we had passed through it alone,’ it has failed? Do you care for him enough to live for him, not tomorrow, but when he is an old, faded man, and you an old, faded woman? Can you forgive him his sins and his weaknesses, when they hurt you most? If he were to lie a querulous invalid for twenty years, would you be able to fold him in your arms all that time, and comfort him, as a mother comforts her little child?” The woman drew her breath heavily.
“Oh, I love him absolutely! I would be glad to die, if only I could once know that he loved me better than anything in the world!”
The woman stood looking down at her. “Have you never thought of that other woman; whether she could not perhaps make his life as perfect as you?” she asked, slowly.
“Oh, no woman ever could be to him what I would be. I would live for him. He belongs to me.” She bent herself forward, not crying, but her shoulders moving. “It is such a terrible thing to be a woman, to be able to do nothing and say nothing!”
The woman put her hand on her shoulder; the younger woman looked up into her face; then the elder turned away and stood looking into the fire. There was such quiet, you could hear the clock tick above the writing-table.
The woman said: “There is one thing I can do for you. I do not know if it will be of any use—I will do it.” She turned away.
“Oh, you are so great and good, so beautiful, so different from other women, who are always thinking only of themselves! Thank you so much. I know I can trust you. I couldn’t have told my mother, or any one but you.”