“Of course I came.”
He put his hat on the round table. Eve glanced round the room at the pictures, the furniture and the ornaments.
“I have been sitting here in this room. I came in here because I realised what a ghastly prig I have been at times. I wanted to be hurt—and hurt badly. Isn’t it wonderful how death strips off one’s conceit?”
He leant forward with his elbows on his knees, a listener—one who understood.
“How I used to hate these things, and to sneer at them. I called them Victorian, and felt superior. Tell me, what right have we ever to feel superior?”
“We are all guilty of that.”
“Guilty of despising other colour schemes that don’t tone with ours. I suppose each generation is more or less colour-blind in its sympathies. Why, she was just a child—just a child that had never grown up, and these were her toys. Oh, I understand it now! I understood it when I looked at her child’s face as she lay dead. The curse of being one of the clever little people!”
“You are not that.”
She lay back and covered her eyes with her hands. It was a still grief, the grief of a pride that humbles itself and makes no mere empty outcry.
Canterton watched her, still as a statue. But his eyes and mouth were alive, and within him the warm blood seemed to mount and tremble in his throat.