Suddenly she felt as if she were losing her head, as if she might break down before him, let him into her miserable secret.
“The fact is,” she continued, fixing her eyes upon him, as a criminal might fix his eyes on his judge while denying everything. “The fact is that none of us really can help anyone else. We may think we can sometimes, but we can’t. We all work out our own destinies in absolute loneliness. You and I are very old friends, and yet we are far away from each other, always have been and always shall be. No, you haven’t the power to help me, Seymour.”
“But what is the matter, my dear?”
“Life—life!” she said, and there was a fierce exasperation in her voice. “I cannot understand the unfairnesses of life, the cruel injustices.”
“Are you specially suffering from them to-day?” he asked, and for a moment his eyes were less soft, more penetrating, as they looked at her.
“Yes!” she said.
A terrible feeling of “I don’t care!” was taking possession of her, was beginning to drive her. And she thought of the women of the streets who, in anger or misery, vomit forth their feelings with reckless disregard of opinion in a torrent of piercing language.
“I’m really just like one of them!” was her thought. “Trimmed up as a lady!”
“Some people have such happy lives, years and years of happiness, and others are tortured and tormented, and all their efforts to be happy, or even to be at peace, without any real happiness, are in vain. It is of no use rebelling, of course, and rebellion only reacts on the rebel and makes everything worse, but still—”
Her face suddenly twisted. In all her life she thought she had never felt so utterly hopeless before.