The protest, the explanation, was stopped on her lips. It was true. She felt that they had both changed so much that they might be strangers.
"Do you really think so?" she asked miserably.
"I don't know what to think," he answered honestly, pain in his voice. "I've been—about crazy sometimes, thinking about—things, wanting to see you again. And now—I don't know—you seem so different, sitting there with paint on your face—" Her hand went to her cheek as if it stung her—"and talking about rings. You didn't use to be like this a bit, Helen," he went on earnestly. "It seems to me as if you'd completely lost track of your better self somehow. I wish you'd—"
This struck from her a spark of anger.
"Please don't begin preaching at me! I'm perfectly able to take care of myself. Really, Paul, you just don't understand. It isn't anything, really, a little bit of rouge. I only put it on because I was tired and didn't have any color. And I didn't mean it about the ring. I just didn't think what I was saying. But I guess you're right. I guess neither of us knows the other any more."
She felt desolate, abandoned to dreariness. Everything seemed all wrong with the world. She listened to Paul's assurances that he knew she was all right, whatever she did, that he didn't care anyhow, that she suited him. But they sounded hollow in her ears, for she knew that beneath them was the same uncertainty she felt. When, flushing, he said again that he would get her a ring, she answered that she did not want one, and they said no more about it. The abyss between them was left bridged only by the things they had not said, fearing to make it forever impassable by saying them.
He left her at her door promptly at the proper hour of ten. There was a moment in which a blind feeling in her reached out to him; she felt that they had taken hold of the situation by the wrong end somehow, that everything would be all right if they had had a chance.
He supposed she couldn't take the morning off. He had to see the superintendent, but maybe they could manage an hour or two. No, she had to work. With the threat of that missent message hanging over her she dared not further spoil her record by taking a day off without notice. And she knew that one or two hours more could not possibly make up the months of estrangement between them.
"Well, good-night."
"Good-night." Their hands clung a moment and dropped apart. If only he would say something, do something, she did not know what. But awkwardness held him as it did her.