She nodded at me with an air of accepting the rendered justice and went on with the utmost simplicity. “And what is it that is coming to me now with all the airs of virtue? All the lawful conventions are coming to me, all the glamours of respectability! And nobody can say that I have made as much as the slightest little sign to them. Not so much as lifting my little finger. I suppose you know that?” “I don’t know. I do not doubt your sincerity in anything you say. I am ready to believe. You are not one of those who have to work.” “Have to work—what do you mean?” “It’s a phrase I have heard. What I meant was that it isn’t necessary for you to make any signs.” She seemed to meditate over this for a while. “Don’t be so sure of that,” she said, with a flash of mischief, which made her voice sound more melancholy than before. “I am not so sure myself,” she continued with a curious, vanishing, intonation of despair. “I don’t know the truth about myself because I never had an opportunity to compare myself to anything in the world. I have been offered mock adulation, treated with mock reserve or with mock devotion, I have been fawned upon with an appalling earnestness of purpose, I can tell you; but these later honours, my dear, came to me in the shape of a very loyal and very scrupulous gentleman. For he is all that. And as a matter of fact I was touched.” “I know. Even to tears,” I said provokingly. But she wasn’t provoked, she only shook her head in negation (which was absurd) and pursued the trend of her spoken thoughts. “That was yesterday,” she said. “And yesterday he was extremely correct and very full of extreme self-esteem which expressed itself in the exaggerated delicacy with which he talked. But I know him in all his moods. I have known him even playful. I didn’t listen to him. I was thinking of something else. Of things that were neither correct nor playful and that had to be looked at steadily with all the best that was in me. And that was why, in the end—I cried—yesterday.” “I saw it yesterday and I had the weakness of being moved by those tears for a time.” “If you want to make me cry again I warn you you won’t succeed.” “No, I know. He has been here to-day and the dry season has set in.” “Yes, he has been here. I assure you it was perfectly unexpected. Yesterday he was railing at the world at large, at me who certainly have not made it, at himself and even at his mother. All this rather in parrot language, in the words of tradition and morality as understood by the members of that exclusive club to which he belongs. And yet when I thought that all this, those poor hackneyed words, expressed a sincere passion I could have found in my heart to be sorry for him. But he ended by telling me that one couldn’t believe a single word I said, or something like that. You were here then, you heard it yourself.”