Cobden looked dazed.
“If Pidge thinks it’s silly to act as strangers—and I can see that it is—I’m for trying the other way,” he repeated, when they reached the street.
The whole talk had been subject to most stubborn and perverse distractions. On Sixth Avenue the racket of traffic had become incessant. Apparently Miss Claes had decided to say no more. Callers waited for her in the basement room at Harrow Street, so Pidge followed Dicky to his “parlor,” which she had not entered since the night of Somebody’s Shoulder.
He seemed possessed to talk of what he had heard, as a youth fascinated by a new course to take. He spoke of a man being big enough to stand by and set a woman free; of a man big enough to wait and watch and be a friend, a comrade. And Pidge, who had brought it all about, listened in a sort of terror which only a woman could understand. This thing which she had aroused in him, this answer of his deep, but still vague powers, to her thoughtless challenge, frightened her now that it had come.
“Don’t, oh, don’t let’s talk any more!” she said at last. “It’s talk, Dicky, just talk. The doing is different, the doing is harder! What do we know of what life will fix for us to do day by day through the years? This thing is so hard that Miss Claes herself hated to let it out. It belongs to you differently than it belongs to me. I haven’t anything to give for your friendship and association. I mean you’ll always want more than I can give.”
He looked at her steadily for an instant.
“I don’t want to be strangers again, Pidge. I want to stand by and wait.”
“You won’t know better than to build pictures while you wait. No one would. You will wait—while you’re away in Africa, making pictures about me, pictures of what I am not! I don’t know why I’m chosen to hurt you. If I hadn’t been so utterly lost in myself, I never could have brought this on. I feel that I’ve started a new set of conditions to bring you to another moment—another gash—like in this room the last time we were here. And oh, Dicky Cobden, I don’t want to! To be strangers! To be common and hateful and avoid each other is so much more simple and easy.”
“I’ll stop talking, Pidge,” he said quietly. “It may be easier to be strangers, but it doesn’t look rosy to me. Don’t you worry about it. It is my job and I’ll take a chance.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying!”