But they were not felt to be beastly by Rosalie, then. They are said here to be beastly, for they were beastly, only in excuse for Rosalie afterwards. They only were to her, then, intensely sad, most deeply pitiful, intensely increasing of her love for Keggo as pure love is increased by seeing its object in tortures that may not be helped because they will not be confessed. If only Keggo would tell her! Once or twice she said to Keggo, speaking with an entreaty that must have made obvious to Keggo her knowledge, “Keggo, haven’t you something to tell me; something that you’d like to tell me?” The occasion was always when she was leaving after a visit that had found Keggo very unwell, very dejected of spirits, and that Keggo had at last terminated by saying, “I think perhaps you had better go, Rosalie. I think perhaps I’d be better lying down.” But Keggo’s answer always was, “Something to tell you? No, nothing at all! What should I have to tell you?”
And then one day something said brought them very near to the matter between them. Miss Keggs came nearer yet. She said, “The fact is, Rosalie, I sometimes get so I simply cannot make an effort, the smallest effort. I believe when I’m like that if a thousand pounds were offered me for the going out and asking of it, and God knows I want it badly enough, I simply could not make the effort to do it. I’d simply let it pass and know that I was letting it pass and not care. That’s how it’s got with me, how it is sometimes with me, Rosalie.”
Rosalie said with extraordinary emphasis, leaning forward on the chair in which she sat facing Keggo. “Why is it, Keggo?”
If Keggo had answered, the thing would not have happened. Keggo did not answer. She was sitting with her hands crossed, one palm upon the other, and resting on her lap, her eyes to the ground. Quite a long time passed. Rosalie said, “You’re drinking, aren’t you, Keggo?”
Sne cried. Her sympathies, though drying and slower now to be aroused, still then were such that she could weep for pity. It is a glimpse of her not to be seen again. There was she on her knees by Keggo, and with her arms about Keggo’s waist, and with her head on Keggo’s lap, crying for Keggo; and in the pauses of Keggo’s unfolding of her story entreating her, as one that cried responses to a litany, “Don’t mind, Keggo! Keggo, don’t mind now! Dear Keggo, poor Keggo, it’s all right now.”