“An oddly uneven pair!” “Alick Craven was with us, too.” “The boy I met here one Sunday.” Lady Sellingworth felt an almost fierce flash of irritation as she heard him say “boy.” “He’s hardly a boy,” she said. “He must be at least thirty, and I think he seems even older than he is.” “Does he? He struck me as very young. When he went away with that pretty girl it was like young April going out of the room with all the daffodils. They matched.” The intense irritation grew in Lady Sellingworth. She felt as if she were being pricked by a multitude of pins. “Beryl is years and years younger than he is!” she said. “I don’t think you are very clever about ages, Seymour. There must be nearly ten years difference between them.” Scarcely had she said this than her mind added, “And about thirty years’ difference between him and me!” And then something in her--she thought of it as the soul--crumpled up, almost as if trying to die and know nothing more. “What is it, Adela?” again he said, gently. “Can’t I help you?” “No, no, you can’t!” she answered, almost with desperation, no longer able to control herself thoroughly. Suddenly she felt as if she were losing her head, as if she might break down before him, let him into her miserable secret. “The fact is,” she continued, fixing her eyes upon him, as a criminal might fix his eyes on his judge while denying everything. “The fact is that none of us really can help anyone else. We may think we can sometimes, but we can’t. We all work out our own destinies in absolute loneliness. You and I are very old friends, and yet we are far away from each other, always have been and always shall be. No, you haven’t the power to help me, Seymour.” “But what is the matter, my dear?” “Life--life!” she said, and there was a fierce exasperation in her voice. “I cannot understand the unfairnesses of life, the cruel injustices.” “Are you specially suffering from them to-day?” he asked, and for a moment his eyes were less soft, more penetrating, as they looked at her. “Yes!” she said. A terrible feeling of “I don’t care!” was taking possession of her, was beginning to drive her. And she thought of the women of the streets who, in anger or misery, vomit forth their feelings with reckless disregard of opinion in a torrent of piercing language. “I’m really just like one of them!” was her thought. “Trimmed up as a lady!” “Some people have such happy lives, years and years of happiness, and others are tortured and tormented, and all their efforts to be happy, or even to be at peace, without any real happiness, are in vain. It is of no use rebelling, of course, and rebellion only reacts on the rebel and makes everything worse, but still--” Her face suddenly twisted. In all her life she thought she had never felt so utterly hopeless before. Sir Seymour stretched out a hand to put it on hers, but she drew away. “No, no--don’t! I’m not--you can’t do anything, Seymour. It’s no use!”