When she knew that they had gone, Betty seemed to lose suddenly the strength she had summoned to her for resistance; she had no more need of it; the long struggle was over. She shivered a little at that past bitterness, and buried her face in her two hands. When she looked up again, the past lay, as it were, slain; all the future waited.
The struggle, made so hard and bitter at the first, had at the last been easy. Warren Venables had let it rest in the end, realizing bitterly at last the ineffectualness of contest. Prudence had assisted him to that realization.
'We can't do anything for them now; we're no good to them; we only hurt them. We've got to leave them alone.'
It was strange to Warren to see how her eyes were wet.
'It's easy enough for you,' he said, his voice hard and level. 'You don't know how much I care.'
She said, very gently, 'I do,' and then was silent for a moment, thinking perhaps that what she did not know was rather how much she herself might possibly have cared, had many things been wholly different; had not the unconquerable 'there is nothing to say' finally summed up the situation as far as her part in it went. But of those vague might-have-beens Warren knew nothing.
Prudence said:
'I do know. And that's why you'll leave them alone—because you care. For if you don't, you'll hurt them—horribly. Don't you see? We've hurt them enough; this is the only amends possible—the only amends they will take.'
'Amends!' His face was set like a flint, his way when he was hurt. 'That's just it. I've been a brute all along; and when I came to know it, through their coming to know it, and through my coming to care so much, I wasn't allowed to make any amends. That's what I can't stand.'
(He had been shaken and stirred of late out of all his self-containment; Prudence had heard many things from him.)