"She didn't flare up, she didn't even ask me how I knew; she only gave a sort of groan and said: 'Oh, but Aunt Selina, I haven't any life to throw away! It's all been burned and frozen out of me; there's nothing left but a shell, and that won't last long! Can't you let me pass the little that remains in peace? That's all I ask for—I gave up happiness long ago. It won't last long! It can hurt no one!'
"'You have an immortal soul,' said I; 'you can hurt that.'
"She sat looking at the floor for a while and then said imploringly: 'Don't ask me to go back to James, Aunt Selina, for that's the one thing I can't do.' 'I shan't ask you to do anything,' I told her, but I knew perfectly well that I was prepared to go down on my knees before her, when the time came....
"But it hadn't come yet—there was a great deal to be done first. What I did was to tell her something about my own life, in the hope that it might throw a new light on her situation. I told her things that I've never told to a human being and never expected to tell another....
"James, I think I ought to tell you the whole thing, as I told it to her. It may help you to understand ... certain things you must understand. Do you mind?"
She paused, less for the purpose of obtaining his consent than in order to gain a perfect control over her voice and manner. Taking James' silence as acquiescence she folded her hands in her lap and went on in a low quiet voice:
"I haven't had much of a life, according to most ways of thinking. All I ever knew of life, as I suppose you know it, was concentrated into a few months. Not that I didn't have a good time during my girlhood and youth. My mother died when I was a baby, but my stepmother took as good care of me as if I had been her own child, and I loved her almost like my own mother. I've often thought, though, that if my mother had lived things might have turned out differently. Stepmothers are never quite the same thing.
"Well, I grew up and flew about with the college boys in the usual way. I never cared a rap for any of them, beyond the bedtime raptures that girls go through. I was able to manage them all pretty easily; I see now that I was too attractive to them. I had a great deal of what in those days was referred to as 'animation,' which is another way of saying that I was an active, strong-willed, selfish little savage. I was willing to play with the college men, but I always said that when I fell in love it would be with a real man. I laughed when I said it, but I meant it.
"Presently there came a change. Father died, and when I came out of mourning the college men I knew best had graduated and the others seemed too young and silly for me even to play with. It was at about this time, when I was adjusting myself to new conditions and casting about for something to occupy my mind that I came to know Milton Leffert."
James stirred slightly. Aunt Selina smiled.