Then my heart beat harder. What if she told him about me? And one minute I was sick with being afraid she would, and next minute I was wild for fear she wouldn't. I didn't want to see him. I'd said I wasn't going to see him till I could meet him sometime when I was the way I was going to be. But I'd have come pretty near to giving up my whole chance of ever being anything, just to have his hands shut over mine and to hear him say my name again.
She didn't tell him, Mrs. Carney wasn't the telling kind. In a few minutes they begun to talk of other things—Europe and Washington and theaters. And while I stood there, looking at him and looking, it came over me that to be listening there wouldn't be the way Mrs. Carney would act, nor the way he'd meant me to act. So I looked at him once, hard enough to last, the best a look can last, and then I run away up to my room and locked the door. I stood in the middle of the floor and kind of flung myself on to something or somebody in the air, that it seemed to me must have been listening to me.
"Make me like I ain't," I says. "Make me different! Make me different—YOU!"
When I heard the door shut, I went back down-stairs. I wanted to be the next one to talk to her after he had. She was in the library, putting the books back. And her face was shining like I'd never seen it.
"Oh, Cosma," she said, "some people make you feel as if it's a good world!"
"It is," I says, "while they're around."
"Yes," she says, "it is—while they're around."
That was all she said. Pretty soon she went back in the drawing-room, and I followed her so's to be where he had been. I'd been going to sit down in the chair where he had sat, but she sat down there. So I stood by the table. And I was glad it happened that neither of us said anything for quite a while.