u can't!" she answered, almost with desperation, no longer
able to control herself thoroughly.

Suddenly she felt as if she were losing her head, as if she might break
down before him, let him into her miserable secret.

"The fact is," she continued, fixing her eyes upon him, as a criminal
might fix his eyes on his judge while denying everything. "The fact
is that none of us really can help anyone else. We may think we can
sometimes, but we can't. We all work out our own destinies in absolute
loneliness. You and I are very old friends, and yet we are far away from
each other, always have been and always shall be. No, you haven't the
power to help me, Seymour."

"But what is the matter, my dear?"

"Life--life!" she said, and there was a fierce exasperation in her
voice. "I cannot understand the unfairnesses of life, the cruel
injustices."

"Are you specially suffering from them to-day?" he asked, and for a
moment his eyes were less soft, more penetrating, as they looked at her.

"Yes!" she said.

A terrible feeling of "I don't care!" was taking possession of her, was
beginning to drive her. And she thought of the women of the streets who,
in anger or misery, vomit forth their feelings with reckless disregard
of opinion in a torrent of piercing language.

"I'm really just like one of them!" was her thought. "Trimmed up as a
lady!"

"Some people have such happy lives, years and years of happiness, and
others are tortured and tormented, and all their efforts to be happy, or
even to be at peace, without any real happiness, are in vain. It is of
no use rebelling, of course, and rebellion only reacts on the rebel and
makes everything worse, but still--"

Her face suddenly twisted. In all her life she thought she had never
felt so utterly hopeless before.

Sir Seymour stretched out a hand to put it on hers, but she drew away.

"No, no--don't! I'm not--you can't do anything, Seymour. It's no use!"

She got up from the sofa, and walked away down the long drawing-room,
trying to struggle with herself, to get back self-control. It was like
madness this abrupt access of passion and violent despair, and she did
not know how to deal with it, did not feel capable of dealing with it.
She looked out of the window into Berkeley Square, after pulling back
curtain and blind. Always Berkeley Square! Berkeley Square till absolute
old age, and then death came! And she seemed to see her own funeral
leaving the door. Good-bye to