Now I did not see what was the use of bringing Agnes Anne into the business. At home she and I were quarrelling about half our time. But since it was to be that or nothing, of course I was not such a fool as to choose the nothing.
All the same, after the promising beginning, I was enormously disappointed, and if only it had been lighter, doubtless my chagrin would have showed on my face. It seemed to me (not knowing) the death-blow to all my hopes. I did not then understand that in all the unending and necessarily eternal game of chess, which men and women play one against the other, there is no better opening than this.
But I was still crassly ignorant, intensely disappointed. I even swore that I would not have given a brass farthing to be “cared about” by Irma as I myself did about Agnes Anne.
Dimly, however, I did feel, even then, that there was a fallacy somewhere. And that, however much human beings with youthful hearts and answering eyes may pretend they are brother and sister, there is something deep within them that moves the Previous Question—as we are used to say in the Eden Valley Debating Parliament, which Mr. Oglethorpe and my father have organized on the model of that in the Gentleman’s Magazine.
But Irma, at least, had no such fear. She had, she believed, solved for ever a difficult and troublesome question, and, on easy terms, provided herself with a new relative, useful, safe and insured against danger by fire. Perhaps the underwriters of the city would not have taken the latter risk, but at that moment it seemed a slight one to Irma Sobieski.
At any rate, to seal the new alliance, in all sisterly freedom she gave me her hand, and did not appear to notice how long I kept it in the darkness. This was certainly a considerable set-off against the feeling of loneliness, and, if not quite content, I was at least more so. I wondered, among other things, if Irma’s heart kept knocking in a choking kind of way against the bottom of her throat.
At least mine did, and I had never, to my knowledge, felt just so about Agnes Anne. Indeed, I don’t think I had ever held Agnes Anne’s hand so long in my life, except to pick a thorn out of it with a needle, or to point out how disgracefully grubby it was.