He had almost come to hate the state he conceived of as goodness; yet the other thing, its opposite, evil, he instinctively rebelled against and even almost feared. The habit of a life-time was not to be broken in a day, or even in many days. Often he had thought of himself as walking in nothingness, because he rejected evil.
Goodness had ruthlessly cast him out; and so far he had made no other friend, had taken no other comrade to his bruised and bleeding heart.
Mrs. Clarke began to talk to him quietly. She talked abut herself, and he knew that she did this not because of egoism, but because delicately she wished to give him a full opportunity for recovery. She had seen just where he was, and she had understood his recoil from the abyss. Now she wished, perhaps, to help him to draw back farther from it, to draw back so far that he would no longer see it or be aware of it.
So she talked of herself, of her life at Buyukderer in the summer, and in Pera in the autumn and spring.
“I don’t go out to Buyukderer till the middle of May,” she said, “and I come back into town at the end of September.”
“You manage to stand Pera for some months every year?” said Dion, listening at first with difficulty, and because he was making a determined effort.
“Yes. An Englishwoman—even a woman like me—can’t live in Stamboul. And Pera, odious as it is, is in Constantinople, in the city which has a spell, though you mayn’t feel it yet.”
She was silent for a moment, and they heard the roar from the Grande Rue, that street which is surely the noisiest in all Europe. Hearing it, Dion thought of the silence of the Precincts at Welsley. That sweet silence had cast him out. Hell must be full of roaring noises and of intense activities. Then Mrs. Clarke went on talking. There was something very feminine and gently enticing in her voice, which resembled no other voice ever heard by Dion. He felt kindness at the back of her talk, the wish to alleviate his misery if only for a moment, to do what she could for him. She could do nothing, of course. Nevertheless he began to feel grateful to her. She was surely unlike other women, incapable of bearing a grudge. For he had not been very “nice” to her in the days when he was happy and she was in difficulties. At this moment he vaguely exaggerated his lack of “niceness,” and perhaps also her pardoning temperament. In truth, he was desperately in need of a touch from the magic wand of sympathy. Believing, or even perhaps knowing, that to the incurably wounded man palliatives are of no lasting avail, he had deliberately fled from them, and gone among those who had no reason to bother about him. But now he was grateful.
“Go on talking,” he said once, when she stopped speaking. And she continued talking about her life. She said nothing more about Jimmy.
The Corsican waiter came and took away the tea things noisily. Her spell was broken. For a moment Dion felt dazed.