Part 34 (2/2)
The hard face relaxed a very little, and she shrugged her shoulders.
”Oh, well, it isn't easy to be kind,” she answered, ”when you don't stand for much else in the universe but a letter of the alphabet.” She turned back to her grate and commenced sweeping up the ashes.
Basil roused himself a little further and looked interested.
”What letter do you stand for?”
”Just G.” She gave a low, harsh laugh. ”G is the letter that distinguishes my flat from the others, and it is all I stand for to G.o.d or man.”
”I see.” His white, pain wrung face looked extraordinarily kind.
”Well, G, I'm very deeply grateful to you for coming across to light my fire; and I'm glad there happened to be a G in the universe this afternoon.”
She turned her head away sharply, that neither of them might see the sudden, swift mist that dimmed her eyes, but she only answered:
”All the same, if there had been no G, and no you, the universe would have had an atom less pain in it, and no one have been any the worse.”
”That's where you're wrong,” he told her, ”because Ethel couldn't have done without me, and if you put your head in at my door occasionally, and just remark to F that G is across the pa.s.sage, F will be glad the universe didn't decide to leave G out of the alphabet.”
The woman looked at him a moment with a curious expression in her eyes.
Then she said:
”Well, if _you_ can take the insult of a maimed, or joyless, or cursed life like that, it oughtn't to be so very hard for me to be glad I happened to be able to come over and light your fire.”
”Nor so very hard to come again.”
”Ah!...” she hesitated, then said to him, looking half-defiantly towards Ethel: ”Time after time, when I thought you were alone, I've wanted to just look in and see if you were all right. But I didn't like to. People don't take to me as a rule, and I'm... I'm... well, I'm not an ingratiating sort of person, and I guessed, probably, you'd all rather do without any help I had to give.”
”It was kind of you to think of us at all,” Ethel said, not quite sure whether Basil would like her to come in or not.
”You guessed wrong,” was his answer. ”_I_ think it would be very nice of you to look in occasionally. It certainly seems rather absurd for you to be all alone there, and I all alone here, when we both want a little company. I'm sure the alphabet was not meant to be so unsociable.”
”It just depends.”
She got up from her keneeling posture on the hearth, and stood, a grotesque apparition enough, looking at him with her greenish, nondescript eyes. Her hay-coloured hair was tightly drawn back from a high, bulging forehead, her eyebrows were so light they scarcely showed at all, while her nose, which started in a nice straight line, had failed her at the last moment by suddenly taking an upward turn in an utterly incongruous fas.h.i.+on. She had high cheek-bones, a parchment skin, and a mouth that was not much more than a slit; the grotesque effect of the whole being heightened by a long, thin neck, which she made no effort to cover with a neat high collar, but accentuated by a half-and-half untidily loose one.
She wore a cheap, ready-made blouse, with absurd little bows tacked on down the front, which Ethel longed to abolish with one sweep, and her skirt, which had shrunk considerably in front, sagged in a dejected fas.h.i.+on behind.
Yet to Basil's kindly eyes, there was something behind it all that was attractive. Fore one thing, she was so eminently sincere. One felt she had no delusions whatever, concerning her appearance or her oddities; and though she looked out upon life with that scornful, resentful air, she had yet a keener sense of humour and a clearer brain than most women. Under different circ.u.mstances she might have been a success.
As it was, she appeared to have got into a wrong groove altogether, and, unable to extricate herself, to have merely become an oddity.
Basil, from his couch, looked up at her with friendly eyes, and she finished:
”One may want a little company, without wanting just any company.”
”You think you will find me even duller than nothing?” and his eyes twinkled.
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