Fan drew back a little and looked with a strange, questioning gaze into her friend's face; but Mary, for once, instead of boldly meeting the look, dropped her eyes and reddened a little.
“There will never, never be any rupture, Mary. If you were to shut your door against me, I would come and sit down on the doorstep, which I once—”
“Be quiet!” exclaimed Mary, with sudden passion. “How can you have the courage to speak of such things! The little consideration! If your memory of the past is so faithful—so—so unforgetting, I dare say you can remember only too well that I once—”
“You must be quiet now,” said Fan, stopping her friend's mouth with her hand for the second time, and with a strange little laugh that was half sob. “I only remember, Mary darling, that I was homeless, hungry, in rags, and that you took me in, and were friend and sister and mother to me. Promise, promise that you will never quarrel with me.”
“Never, Fan—unless you, with your wild altruism, drive me to it.”
Fan went home, wondering all the way what her wild altruism was, ashamed of her ignorance. She looked in her dictionary, but it was an old cheap one, and the strange word was not in it. Perhaps Mary had coined it. As to that she would consult Constance, who knew everything.
CHAPTER XLII
Miss Starbrow did not leave London after all, but day followed day only to find her in the same unsettled mind as at first. Having no one else to quarrel with, she quarrelled with and mocked at herself. “I shall wait till the heats are over,” she said, “and then stay on to see the end of the November fogs; then I can go north to winter at Aberdeen or some such delightful place.” But these late London days, while her mind was in this unsatisfactory state, studying to deceive itself, had one great pleasure—the letters which came at intervals of two or three days from her loved friend. Even to her eyes they looked beautiful. The girl of the period, when she writes to her friend, usually dips the handle of her sunshade in a basin of ink, and scrawls characters monstrous in size and form, an insult to the paper-maker's art and shocking to man's aesthetic feelings. Now from the first Fan had spontaneously written a small hand, with fine web-like lines and flourishes, which gave it a very curious and delicate appearance; for, unlike the sloping prim Italian hand, it was all irregular, and the longer curves and strokes crossed and recrossed through words above and beneath, so that, while easy enough to read, at first sight it looked less like writing than an intricate pattern on the paper, as if a score of polar gnats had been figure-skating on the surface with inked skates. To her complaint that she was not clever, not musical, like other girls, Mary had once said: