“Oh, yes, wonderfully. I was getting so bored and dull and miserable. It is not very gay now, but I have something to look forward to every day. And your letting me talk to you has made a great difference.”
“I am afraid I am not very entertaining,” said Katherine.
“Sometimes you are so sad,” said Felicia, sympathetically. “I wish I could help you.”
“I am afraid you would have to upheave the universe, my dear.”
Felicia looked at her with such wonderful gravity in her brown eyes that Katherine broke into a laugh.
“Well, you can do it gradually. Begin with my work-basket, will you? and find me a spool of No. 100 thread.”
Without overstepping the bounds of kindly friendship, they saw much of each other. An imperceptible shadow of reserve in Katherine's manner, a certain variability of mood, a vein of hardness in her nature ever liable to be exposed by a chance thought, checked in the young girl the impulses of a more generous affection. Katherine was conscious of this; conscious, too, of no efforts to win more from the girl. Now and then she sounded a note of explanation.
Once they were talking of the pension's dreariness—an endless topic. It happened that Felicia was disposed to take a cheerful view.
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” she said.
“By way of heightening its blackness, my dear,” said Katherine. “Besides, the lining is turned to heaven and the blackness to earth, so it does not help us much.”