They stared at each other, wide-eyed at their own emotions. They realized that all in a moment they had turned a sharp corner and come face to face with a crisis, that there was now no going back, that they must go forward together or each one alone. For a long time neither spoke, then Joan said quietly:
"You think that I'm able to do as you wish, that I'm able to break through what you call 'the threads of sentimentality,' and you despise me in your heart for hesitating; but if you knew how these threads eat into my flesh you might despise me less for enduring them."
Elizabeth stretched out a scarred hand and touched Joan timidly; her anger had left her as suddenly as it had come, she felt humble and lonely.
"You see," she said, "I'm a woman who has made nothing of life myself and I know the bitterness that comes over one at times, the awful emptiness; but if I can see you happy it won't matter ever again. I don't want any triumphs myself, not now; I only want them for you. I want to sit in the sun and warmth of your success like a lizard on an Italian wall; I want positively to bask. It's not a very energetic programme, perhaps, and I never thought I'd live to feel that way about anything; but that's what it's come to, you see, my dear, and you can't have it in you to leave me shivering in the cold!"
Joan clung to the firm, marred hand like a drowning man to a spar; she felt at that moment that she could never let it go. In her terror lest the hand should some day not be there she grew pale and trembled. She looked into Elizabeth's troubled eyes.
"What do you want of me?" she asked.
"If I told you, would you be afraid?"
"No, I'm only afraid of your taking your hand away."
"Then listen. I want you to work as we are doing until you come of age, then I want you to go to Cambridge, as I've often told you, but after that—I want you to make a home with me."
"Elizabeth!"