“Why haven’t you come to me all this time?”
“I know how fond you are of Dicky Cobden. I haven’t hoped any one could understand.”
“Being fond of Richard Cobden doesn’t make me less fond of you.”
“How could I expect you to understand me, when I can’t understand myself?” Pidge demanded. “I am two people, and they are at war.... No use lying about it. I fell for him, knowing him all the time. Not for a minute did I lose track of what he is. But I wanted him. Something in me answered—that’s all.”
“I’ve always loved that honest Pidge,” said Miss Claes.
“Think, if you like, that it’s part of the evil in me that talks this way about him, but I am talking about myself, too.”
“You could never see all this clearly—without ‘falling for’ him, Pidge.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it would remain a hopeless, unfinished puzzle—if you had run away from Rufus Melton.”
“I couldn’t run away. I wanted him,” Pidge repeated. “But there’s another side. There’s something in him that I seem to have known from the beginning—something like a little child that I left somewhere ages ago. It keeps calling to me from his eyes, and I leave everything to go to it—everything that Dicky means and the world, even writing—I leave all that. And yet when I go, when I go to his arms, I lose the purpose. It’s as if the child that I run to—the irresistible thing that calls to me from his eyes—stops crying and stops needing me! Then I suddenly know that it must need me and not be gratified, ever to be helped. Oh, no one on earth could understand that. It’s insane.”