Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/464

THE AWKWARD AGE flood, and she sobbed in a passion as sharp and brief the flurry of a wild thing for an instant uncaged; her old friend meantime keeping his place in the silence broken by her sound and distantly—across the room—closing his eyes to his helplessness and her shame. Thus they sat together while their trouble both conjoined and divided them. She recovered herself, however, with an effort worthy of her fall, and was on her feet again as she stammeringly spoke and angrily brushed at her eyes. "What difference in the world does it make—what difference ever?" Then, clearly, even with the words, her checked tears suffered her to see that it made the difference that he too had been crying; so that "I don't know why you mind!" she, on this, with extravagance, wailed.

"You don't know what I would have done for him. You don't know, you don't know!" he repeated—while she looked as if she naturally couldn't—as with a renewal of his dream of beneficence and of the soreness of his personal wound.

"Well, but he does you justice—he knows. So it shows, so it shows—!"

But in this direction too, unable to say what it showed, she had again broken down, and again could only hold herself and let her companion sit there. "Ah, Nanda, Nanda!" he deeply murmured; and the depth of the pity was, vainly and blindly, as the depth of a reproach.

"It's I—it's I, therefore," she said as if she must then so look at it with him; "it's I who am the horrible impossible and who have covered everything else with my own impossibility. For some different person you could have done what you speak of, and for some different person you can do it still."

He stared at her with his barren sorrow. "A person different from him?"

"A person different from me." 454