im.
Helen, she knew quite well, still saw Franklin, pleasantly and clearly,
as drab-colour, still, it was probable, saw him as funny; but it was
evident that Helen had come to feel fond of him, if anything so detached
could be called fondness. He could hardly count for anything with
her--after all, who did?--but she liked him, she liked him very much,
and it amused her to watch him adjust himself to his new conditions. She
took him about with her in London and showed him things and people,
ironically smiling, no doubt, and guarding even while she exposed. And
Helen wouldn't do this unless she had come to see something more than
drab-colour and oddity, and whatever the more might be it was not the
millions. No, sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston, with its
memories of the two emotional climaxes of her life, Althea, with a
sinking heart, felt sure that she had lost something, and that she only
knew it lost from seeing that Helen had found it. It had been through
Helen's blindness to the qualities in Franklin which, timidly,
tentatively, she had put before her, that his worth had grown dim to
herself; this was the cutting fact that Althea tried to edge away from,
but that her sincerity forced her again and again to examine. It was
through Helen's appreciation that she now saw more in Franklin than she
had ever seen before. If he was funny he was also original, full of his
own underivative flavour; if he was drab-colour, he was also beautiful.
Althea recalled the benignity of Helen's eyes as they dwelt upon him,
her smile, startled, almost touched, when some quaint, telling phrase
revealed him suddenly as an unconscious torch-bearer in a dusky,
self-deceiving world. Helen and Franklin were akin in that; they
elicited, they radiated truth, and Althea recalled, too, how their eyes
would sometimes meet in silence when they both saw the same truth
simultaneously. Not that Helen's truth was often Franklin's; they were
as alien as ever in their outlook, of this Althea was convinced; but
though the outlook was so different, the faculty of sight was the same
in both--clear, unperturbed, and profoundly independent. They were
neither of them dusky or self-deceived. And what was she? Sitting in the
drawing-room at Merriston and thinking it all over, Althea asked herself
the question while her heart sank to a deeper dejection. Not only had
she lost Franklin; she had lost herself. She embarked on the dangerous
and often demoralising