"Do you think there's anything queer about it?" she faltered.
"Queer?" To Flora's ears that sounded the coldest word she had ever heard. "I hardly think I understand what you mean."
"I mean is it that you think there's more in what I'm asking of you than I have said?" The two looked at each other and before that flat question Mrs. Herrick drew back a little in her chair.
"I have no right to think about it at all," she said.
"Well, there is," Flora insisted. "There's a great deal more. I am sorry. I should have told you, but I was afraid. I don't know why I was afraid of you, except that in this matter I've grown afraid of every one. It's true that there may be people going down--at least, a person. But it isn't, as I let you think it, a house party at all. It's for something, something that I can't do any other way--something," she had a sudden flash of insight, "that, if I could tell you, you would believe in, too."
Mrs. Herrick's look had faded to a mere concentrated attention. "You mean that there is something you wish to do for whoever is going down?"
"Oh, something I must do," Flora insisted.
Mrs. Herrick considered a moment. "Why can't he do it for himself?" she threw out suddenly.
It made Flora start, but she met it gallantly. "Because he won't. I shall have to make him."
"You!" For a moment Flora knew that she was preposterous in Mrs. Herrick's eyes--and then that she was pathetic. Her companion was looking at her with a sad sort of humor. "My dear, are you sure that that is your responsibility?"
Flora's answering smile was faint. "It seems as strange to me as it seems absurd to you, but I think I have done something already."
"Are you sure, or has he only let you think so? We have all at some time longed, or even thought it was our duty, to adjust something when it would have been safer to have kept our hand off," Mrs. Herrick went on gently.
"Oh, safer," Flora breathed. "Oh, yes; indeed, I know. But if something had been put into your hands without your choice; if all the life of some one that you cared about depended on you, would you think of being _safe_?" Flora, leaning forward, chin in hand, with shining eyes, seemed fairly to impart a reflection of her own passionate concentration to the woman before her.