“Have you had anything to eat?”

Emmy nodded.

“Have you slept?”

“That’s a thing I shall never do again,” she said querulously.  “How can you ask?”

“If you don’t sleep, you’ll get ill and die,” said Septimus.

“So much the better,” she replied.

“I wish I could help you.  I do wish I could help you.”

“No one can help me.  Least of all you.  What could a man do in any case?  And, as for you, my poor Septimus, you want as much taking care of as I do.”

The depreciatory tone did not sting him as it would have done another man, for he knew his incapacity.  He had also gone through the memory of Moses’s rod the night before.

“I wonder whether Wiggleswick could be of any use?” he said, more brightly.

Emmy laughed dismally.  Wiggleswick!  To no other mind but Septimus’s could such a suggestion present itself.

“Then what’s to be done?”

“I don’t know,” said Emmy.

They looked at each other blankly, two children face to face with one of the most terrible of modern social problems, aghast at their powerlessness to grapple with it.  It is a situation which wrings the souls of the strong with an agony worse than death.  It crushes the weak, or drives them mad, and often brings them, fragile wisps of human semblance, into the criminal dock.  Shame, disgrace, social pariahdom; unutterable pain to dear ones; an ever-gaping wound in fierce family pride; a stain on two generations; an incurable malady of a once blithe spirit; woe, disaster, and ruin—­such is the punishment awarded by men and women to her who disobeys the social law and, perhaps with equal lack of volition, obeys the law physiological.  The latter is generally considered the greater crime.

These things passed through Septimus’s mind.  His ignorance of the ways of what is, after all, an indifferent, self-centered world exaggerated them.

“You know what it means?” he said tonelessly.

“If I didn’t, should I be here?”

He made one last effort to persuade her to take Zora into her confidence.  His nature abhorred deceit, to say nothing of the High Treason he was committing; a rudiment of common sense also told him that Zora was Emmy’s natural helper and protector.  But Emmy had the obstinacy of a weak nature.  She would die rather than Zora should know.  Zora would never understand, would never forgive her.  The disgrace would kill her mother.

“If you love Zora, as you say you do, you would want to save her pain,” said Emmy finally.

So Septimus was convinced.  But once more, what was to be done?

“You had better go away, my poor Septimus,” she said, bending forward listlessly, her hands in her lap.  “You see you’re not a bit of use now.  If you had been a different sort of man—­like anyone else—­one who could have helped me—­I shouldn’t have told you anything about it.  I’ll send for my old dresser at the theater.  I must have a woman, you see.  So you had better go away.”