“But I’d like to hear.”
Pidge flushed a little as she watched him. Tara Subramini, still afar off, was engaged in words.
“... My house in Harrow Street is just a symbol,” Miss Claes was saying. “To come into one’s house really should mean to come into one’s heart. You both have keys.... What was in my mind to say was that people in your trouble act as strangers for good reasons. If they cannot have each other—they sometimes rush to the other extreme to save themselves the pain of watching another come between.”
Dicky Cobden essayed to light a cigarette. The match broke in his fingers. He did not try again. Miss Claes amplified without apparent feeling:
“Sometimes one who cannot have what he wants—gives way to hatred for a time to ease his wound.... Pidge, what have you to give for the friendship and association of one who wants more?”
“I don’t know that I have anything. I see how selfish I was. It came to me that we, of all people, should be friends, but I didn’t look at the other side.”
“You can be friends, if you are brave enough. You can be, if you dare to come and go and set each other free utterly, but that means long and bitter work.”
The harrowing thing to Pidge was that Miss Claes talked as if Dicky and herself were one in condition and purpose and dilemma, when in reality all the hard part seemed to go to him. She wished Miss Claes would stop, but the words continued with a smooth predestined force:
“The best the world knows, even in books and art, is the kingdom of two; but love doesn’t end in that—at least, not for those who are brave enough and strong enough to sunder their tight little kingdom of each other and let the earth rush in between....”
Tara Subramini’s slippered feet crept in. She stood behind Miss Claes’ shoulders and began to speak of a book of poetic obituaries. The paying of the bill seemed an interminable process.