, you know, who oughtn't
to say that. Because you pretended nothing. You kept everything back,
all along, instead of--instead of giving everything but just one
thing--oh, well.' She could not speak of that. She ended with half a
laugh. 'Nobody, you know, could have thought for a moment that you liked
us.'

'I suppose not,' said Prudence simply. She went on, with something
between explanation and apology: 'You see, I'm not like Aunt Ida; I
don't write.' Betty was grateful to her for making the comparison solely
with her Aunt Ida. 'People to me are simply people....'

Betty nodded.

'I know. Not--not copy.'

'And, you see, friendship isn't a name to me. It's something rather real
and serious. I make friends slowly, I suppose.'

'And you didn't want to make friends with us. Oh, I know.'

'As I saw it, it wouldn't have been fair, you see,' Prudence explained
very gently, looking away, asking forgiveness with her voice.

Betty assented.

'No; it wouldn't have been very fair.'

So their past intercourse was defined in few words. That done, Prudence
turned to the present.

'But now--now it would be fair--if you will.'

Betty shook her head. Prudence had supposed that she would.

'No, not now. That wouldn't at all do.'

They rested on that for a minute before Betty went on.

'Tommy and I have got each other; and that is the way it must be, the
way we've got to do it--don't you see?'

Her eyes seemed to entreat Prudence to see, to make, if she could,
others see.

'It's like this,' the sad tones stammeringly explained. 'We're in a
mess, Tommy and I; and we've got to get out of it somehow, if we
can--find, you know, things we don't hate, things to go on with. That's
all we want: to go on somehow and be happy, as we used to be happy. You
know, you can't be happy if you're wishing all the time to have things
you can't have, and to be things you can't be. So, either we must stop
wishing--and we may do that in time--or we must find new things that we
like. But that's bound to be a long job.' No movement of Prudence's
demurred to that; its truth stared one in the face. 'And perhaps we
can't do that; perhaps things stick always.'

And to that, too, no denial came from the idealist of continual hope,
who yet saw the eternal roads running.

Betty, because she, too, saw their running, said finally:

'I suppose, really, one stays pretty much the same sort of person to the
end.... And that's all right, as long as one