Betty's sad regard, emptied of anger, owned them turned. But she felt a sudden desire to know.

'If we could take anything ... would you give it? You?'

The emphasis on the p.r.o.noun put it in the singular number, thus setting Betty's own acceptance or refusal of offerings outside the range of question and answer, as she had meant. For she was very tired of talking about that. To the personal question Prudence, after a full minute of thinking it over, returned a deliberating answer:

'I don't quite know.'

It was indeed what she had been for some time wondering. But the spoken words seemed to strike her with a sense of incompleteness, of a gap somewhere between themselves and the thought they should have accurately fitted. Prudence, who did not very often clothe her thoughts, was fastidious, when she did, about the garments' fit. She tried something else--a dubious 'I can't be sure, but I suppose ... in the end ... I probably should.'

Betty watched the doubtful pondering. She said:

'You mean because you would think we had a claim? Yes, I know.'

And Prudence returned slowly:

'A little that. But that shouldn't count much.... There would be other things, and they would all have to be weighed.... It wouldn't be easy.'

'No,' Betty said; 'I suppose not. So it's just as well, really, that it can't come to that, that we can't take anything--not either of us, not ever, because of all the things between.'

Then, all the things between growing with the words to insistence, Betty mentioned some of them, impelled, now the barriers were so breaking, to have everything clear.

'There are so many things.... There's all the money we owe. We must pay it back.'

Prudence silently a.s.sented. She wondered how much the Crevequers owed Warren Venables.

'There are c-crowds of other things,' the sad voice stammered on--'everything, almost.... But you know it all. You have known it all the time.'

Their eyes met and looked away. Prudence did not at all deny that she had known it all the time.

'You've all of you known it all the time,' went on the dreary voice, without anger, without hope. Anger had been spent before, on another of those who had 'known it all the time.' (The pa.s.sionate fires of the days of reparation had burned resentment to ashes, and on these had dropped the tears of pity and pain.) Hope there was none. 'But Tommy and I--we've only got to know it lately, you see. We--we didn't understand before. But we understand now. We understand why--why you wouldn't be friends with us.'

Prudence looked away sadly. It was terrible to have to accept it all so, denying nothing. She wanted to heal, but knew no way.

In the pause Betty took up a cigarette-case from Tommy's chair, mechanically fingering it. Then abruptly she dropped it, and looked defiantly up.

'But lots of people do that--the other sort--your sort!' she cried.

Imagination, in these days so morbidly alive, continually invented for her attacks unthought of, and called out defence to meet what needed none. For discrimination was of so new a growth.

Prudence said quickly, 'But I know--oh, I know! Please don't!'--protesting, apologizing for the existence of this gulf, which had so yawned to exaggeration. Such an over-recognition of it as that last had implied hurt her more than what had gone before; it showed so vividly how the Crevequers staggered under their new knowledge, pitifully unsteady as yet on the fresh ground. She said presently, having thought things over: 'If I have been horrid, and hurt you, I beg your pardon. I am very sorry.'

'It's just you,' said Betty, 'out of all of you, you know, who oughtn't to say that. Because you pretended nothing. You kept everything back, all along, instead of--instead of giving everything but just one thing--oh, well.' She could not speak of that. She ended with half a laugh. 'n.o.body, you know, could have thought for a moment that you liked us.'

'I suppose not,' said Prudence simply. She went on, with something between explanation and apology: 'You see, I'm not like Aunt Ida; I don't write.' Betty was grateful to her for making the comparison solely with her Aunt Ida. 'People to me are simply people....'

Betty nodded.

'I know. Not--not copy.'

'And, you see, friendship isn't a name to me. It's something rather real and serious. I make friends slowly, I suppose.'

'And you didn't want to make friends with us. Oh, I know.'

'As I saw it, it wouldn't have been fair, you see,' Prudence explained very gently, looking away, asking forgiveness with her voice.

Betty a.s.sented.

'No; it wouldn't have been very fair.'

So their past intercourse was defined in few words. That done, Prudence turned to the present.

'But now--now it would be fair--if you will.'

Betty shook her head. Prudence had supposed that she would.

'No, not now. That wouldn't at all do.'

They rested on that for a minute before Betty went on.

'Tommy and I have got each other; and that is the way it must be, the way we've got to do it--don't you see?'

Her eyes seemed to entreat Prudence to see, to make, if she could, others see.

'It's like this,' the sad tones stammeringly explained. 'We're in a mess, Tommy and I; and we've got to get out of it somehow, if we can--find, you know, things we don't hate, things to go on with. That's all we want: to go on somehow and be happy, as we used to be happy. You know, you can't be happy if you're wishing all the time to have things you can't have, and to be things you can't be. So, either we must stop wishing--and we may do that in time--or we must find new things that we like. But that's bound to be a long job.' No movement of Prudence's demurred to that; its truth stared one in the face. 'And perhaps we can't do that; perhaps things stick always.'

And to that, too, no denial came from the idealist of continual hope, who yet saw the eternal roads running.

Betty, because she, too, saw their running, said finally:

'I suppose, really, one stays pretty much the same sort of person to the end.... And that's all right, as long as one doesn't run up against other sorts; it hurts to do that'--at the pain of that clash of codes her brows knit--'and that's why we won't try m-mixing the sorts; it wouldn't be what you call fair, on either sort.'

Prudence heard the finality in that: it found its echo in her soul; but still she pleaded Warren's cause (he cared so much) with:

'But if both cared to.... Oh, that isn't quite all there is to it, I know--I'm not a fool who can only see one thing--but it's a thing that should count a great deal. Of all the many, many things, I believe that's the one that, perhaps, in the end counts most.'

Betty admitted it.

'More than any one other; but not more than all the others together. You see, there are rather many, and it wouldn't do. It wouldn't w-work, you know it wouldn't; and--and it would hurt rather.... Oh, it wouldn't do.'

She clenched her lip again between her teeth, perhaps to steady it.

Prudence thought it all over, admitting it true, before saying, with a quick tremor in her own voice:

'But, perhaps, sometime--afterwards....'

Betty unclasped her hands from her knee and leaned her chin on them, and looked straight in front of her.

'No,' she said; 'I think never. Then she gave it a turn, swerving as usual from her own part, with 'You know it--you yourself.'