t that he was different from the
others; that if I were in straits of any kind, I could call on him. You
can't know what that feeling means to me, Carrie. If you look back,
you'll see it's something I've never had."

I admitted that, in so far as I knew, she had never been much addicted to
leaning on people.

"I've never had any one to lean on," she said with a short laugh. Then
she went on, quite seriously: "Somehow, my relations with people always
become business relations in the end. I suppose it's because,--except for
a sort of professional personality, which I've had to get, just as I've
had to get so many other things,--I've not very much that's personal to
give people. I've had to give too much else. I've had to try too hard for
people who wouldn't try at all."

"Which," I put in firmly, "has done them no good, and has robbed the
people who really cared about you."

"By making me grubby, you mean?"

"By making you anxious and distracted so much of the time; empty."

She nodded mournfully. "Yes, I know. You used to warn me. Well,
there's not one of my brothers and sisters who does not feel that I
carried off the family success, just as I might have carried off the
family silver,--if there'd been any! They take the view that there were
just so many prizes in the bag; I reached in and took them, so there were
none left for the others. At my age, that's a dismal truth to waken up
to."

Cressida reached for my hand and held it a moment, as if she needed
courage to face the facts in her case. "When one remembers one's first
success; how one hoped to go home like a Christmas tree full of
presents--How much one learns in a life-time! That year when Horace was a
baby and Charley was dying, and I was touring the West with the Williams
band, it was my feeling about my own people that made me go at all. Why I
didn't drop myself into one of those muddy rivers, or turn on the gas in
one of those dirty hotel rooms, I don't know to this day. At twenty-two
you must hope for something more than to be able to bury your husband
decently, and what I hoped for was to make my family happy. It was the
same afterward in Germany. A young woman must live for human people.
Horace wasn't enough. I might have had lovers, of course. I suppose you
will say it would have been better if I had."

Though there seemed no need for me to say anything, I murmured that I
thought there were more likely to be limits to the rapacity of a lover
th