I pretend when you don't. I'm not in love with Franklin.
I'm unworthy of him--more unworthy of him than you were--but I'm not in
love with him, even though he is an angel. So don't tell me that I am
lucky. I am a most miserable woman.' And she wept on, indifferent now to
any revelations.

Presently she heard Helen's voice. It was harder than she had ever known
it. 'May I say something? It's for his sake--more than for yours. What I
advise you to do is not to bother so much about love. You couldn't stick
to Gerald because you weren't loved enough; and you're doubting your
feeling for Franklin, now, because you can't love him enough. Give it
all up. Follow my second-rate example. Be glad that you're marrying an
angel and that he has all that money. And do remember that though you're
not getting what you want, you are getting a good deal and he is getting
nothing, so try to play the game and to see if you can't make it up to
him; see if you can't make him happy.'

Althea's sobbing had now ceased, though she kept her face still covered.
Bitter sadness, too deep now for resentment, was in her silence, a
silence in which she accepted what Helen's words had of truth. The
sadness was to see at last to the full, that she had no place in Helen's
life. There was no love, there was hardly liking, behind Helen's words.
And so it had been from the very first, ever since she had loved and
Helen accepted; ever since she had gone forth carrying gifts, and Helen
had stood still and been vaguely aware that homage was being offered. It
had, from the very beginning, been this; Helen, hard, self-centred,
insensible, so that anything appealing or uncertain was bound to be
shattered against her. And was not this indifference to offered love a
wrong done to it, something that all life cried out against? Had not
weakness and fear and the clinging appeal of immaturity their rights, so
that the strong heart that was closed to them, that did not go out to
them in tenderness and succour, was the dull, the lesser heart? Dimly
she knew, not exculpating herself, not judging her beautiful Helen, that
though she had, in her efforts towards happiness, pitifully failed,
there was failure too in being blind, in being unconscious of any effort
to be made. The more trivial, the meaner aspect of her grief was merged
in a fundamental sincerity.

'What you say is true,' she said, 'for I know that I am a poor creature.
I know that I give Franklin nothing, and t