“Oh, you don’t know,” she exclaimed irritably, that ugly fighting light coming into her eyes, which I had seen there several times before. “You don’t know what my life has been. I haven’t been so bad. We all of us do the best we can. I have done the best I could, considering.”
“Yes, yes,” I observed, “you’re ambitious and alive and you’re seeking—Heaven knows what! You would be adorable with your pretty face and body if you were not so—so sophisticated. The trouble with you is—”
“Oh, look at that cute little boat out there!” She was talking of the lightship. “I always feel sorry for a poor little thing like that, set aside from the main tide of life and left lonely—with no one to care for it.”
“The trouble with you is,” I went on, seizing this new remark as an additional pretext for analysis, “you’re romantic, not sympathetic. You’re interested in that poor little lonely boat because its state is romantic; not pathetic. It may be pathetic, but that isn’t the point with you.”
“Well,” she said, “if you had had all the hard knocks I have had, you wouldn’t be sympathetic either. I’ve suffered, I have. My illusions have been killed dead.”
“Yes. Love is over with you. You can’t love any more. You can like to be loved, that’s all. If it were the other way about—”
I paused to think how really lovely she would be with her narrow lavender eyelids; her delicate, almost retroussé, little nose; her red cupid’s-bow mouth.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, with a gesture of almost religious adoration. “I cannot love any one person any more, but I can love love, and I do—all the delicate things it stands for.”
“Flowers,” I observed, “jewels, automobiles, hotel bills, fine dresses.”
“Oh, you’re brutal. I hate you. You’ve said the cruelest, meanest things that have ever been said to me.”