At this she looked swiftly at him with an astonishment that slowly softened to a smile. "You are a strange, a good friend," she said.
"Ah, yes," she replied, "I accept you as such--gratefully. I don't call you. Those days are over."
She rose, pushing the harp aside, and walked slowly down the room, pausing at the window and looking out. He divined that she was much touched, even that there were tears in her eyes. He feared to show her the depths of his feeling for her, his longing to enter her life, help her, if it might be, in it; but, rising too, he said in a slightly trembling voice: "You don't need my friendship, but I need yours. Let that be my claim."
"Your claim to what?" she asked, her face still turned from him.
"To the hope that I may grow into your confidence--the hope that you will lean on me, trust me completely, and that, with time, I may, perhaps, mean something to you of what you mean to me."
Her face now, as she looked at him, showed a curious, a vivid look of wonder, humor, tenderness, and sadness.
"What am I, that I should mean so much to you? You don't know me."
"Is that your kind way of intimating that I can mean nothing to you--that you don't know me?" he smiled.
"Ah, don't think that I am so hard and stupid!" she said quickly. "Don't think that I am fencing with you, trying to ward off a friendship I can't appreciate. Don't think that I have no need of a friend. I have; I have--only I had forgotten to feel it. I do not say that I have no friends; you know that I have, and good ones--only you do not wish to rank with them. Isn't it so?" She smiled swiftly, from her gravity, at him. "There is good Madame Dépressier, and the comtesse, and little Sophie,--who needs me, poor child, in her struggle and loneliness,--and the others, true and good all; but none near. You would be near,--would you not?--and have me share pain with you--lean on you, you say." His fine young face, stern with eagerness, followed her words in silent assent. "But it would be difficult for me to have such a friend. I have never had such a friend. It is difficult, painful to me to show myself, be myself. I am a hard, I fear a spoiled, stunted nature. You heard--of course you must have heard; it is the one thing that anybody must hear who hears at all of me--that my marriage was very unhappy. It warped me; it froze me. There was no one to help me when I needed help, or to hear me, even had I not been too proud to call, and I lost the power of appeal or self-expression. If I had been gentler, less bitter in my despair, less rebellious, I might have kept more in touch with life, been more natural, more responsive. As it is, I can still feel--deeply, deeply; but it is hard for me to respond. I am old enough to be your mother. No? Well, almost." She smiled slightly at his exactitude. "I am very different from the girl in the photograph whose eyes called to you--prophetic eyes they must have been! You must not expect fine things of me; you must not idealize me." She put her hand gently, maternally on his shoulder. "Never idealize me. That is a dangerous--a terrible thing to do."