“Sometimes one who cannot have what he wants--gives way to hatred for a time to ease his wound.... Pidge, what have you to give for the friendship and association of one who wants more?” “I don’t know that I have anything. I see how selfish I was. It came to me that we, of all people, should be friends, but I didn’t look at the other side.” “You can be friends, if you are brave enough. You can be, if you dare to come and go and set each other free utterly, but that means long and bitter work.” The harrowing thing to Pidge was that Miss Claes talked as if Dicky and herself were one in condition and purpose and dilemma, when in reality all the hard part seemed to go to him. She wished Miss Claes would stop, but the words continued with a smooth predestined force: “The best the world knows, even in books and art, is the kingdom of two; but love doesn’t end in that--at least, not for those who are brave enough and strong enough to sunder their tight little kingdom of each other and let the earth rush in between....” Tara Subramini’s slippered feet crept in. She stood behind Miss Claes’ shoulders and began to speak of a book of poetic obituaries. The paying of the bill seemed an interminable process. Cobden looked dazed. “If Pidge thinks it’s silly to act as strangers--and I can see that it is--I’m for trying the other way,” he repeated, when they reached the street. The whole talk had been subject to most stubborn and perverse distractions. On Sixth Avenue the racket of traffic had become incessant. Apparently Miss Claes had decided to say no more. Callers waited for her in the basement room at Harrow Street, so Pidge followed Dicky to his “parlor,” which she had not entered since the night of Somebody’s Shoulder. He seemed possessed to talk of what he had heard, as a youth fascinated by a new course to take. He spoke of a man being big enough to stand by and set a woman free; of a man big enough to wait and watch and be a friend, a comrade. And Pidge, who had brought it all about, listened in a sort of terror which only a woman could understand. This thing which she had aroused in him, this answer of his deep, but still vague powers, to her thoughtless challenge, frightened her now that it had come. “Don’t, oh, don’t let’s talk any more!” she said at last. “It’s talk, Dicky, just talk. The doing is different, the doing is harder! What do we know of what life will fix for us to do day by day through the years? This thing is so hard that Miss Claes herself hated to let it out. It belongs to you differently than it belongs to me. I haven’t anything to give for your friendship and association. I mean you’ll always want more than I can give.” He looked at her steadily for an instant. “I don’t want to be strangers again, Pidge. I want to stand by and wait.”