But while with her mind and soul, as
she told herself, she thus held him away, she was conscious of the inner
wail of loneliness and unconscious that, under the steady resolution, every
faculty, every charm she possessed, was spinning and stretching itself out
to surround and hold him.
She made no appeal, but he would feel her quiet sadness weigh upon him;
she made no reproach, but she knew that he could but be full of pity for
her weariness, of love for her devotedness, when her pale profile bent by
lamplight over all the tedious work of the tableaux; knew that her patient
"Good-night, dear Jack,--I'm too tired to stay and talk," must smite him
with compunction and uneasiness.
It was no direct communication; she used symbols to convey to him the
significance that he seemed to be forgetting. She took him to one of Miss
Bocock's lectures, gently disowning praise for her part in their success.
She took him to the hospital for cripple children, where the nurses smiled
at her and the children clambered, crutches and all, into her lap,--she
knew how lovely she must look, enfolding cripple children. She took both
her mother and him to her Girls' Club on the East side, where they saw her
surrounded by adoring gratitude and enthusiasm, where she sat hand in hand
with her "girls," all sympathy, all tenderness, all interest,--all the
things that Jack had loved her for and that he still, of course, loved her
for.
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