“How do you, do?” she said, with rather ostentatiously suppressed wonder.  “Please sit down, but not in that chair.  It is not quite reliable.  This one, I think is better.  How are—­how are you?”

The slight emphasis she placed on the last word was airy and regardless.  Janet would have preferred to have been met by one of the old affectations; she would have felt herself taken more seriously.

“It’s very late to come, and I interrupt you,” she said awkwardly, glancing at the manuscript.

“Not at all.  I am very happy—­”

“But of course I had a special reason for coming.  It is serious enough, I think, to justify me.”

“What can it be!”

“Don’t, Elfrida,” Janet cried passionately.  “Listen to me.  I have come to try to make things right again between us—­to ask you to forgive me for speaking as I—­as I did about your writing that day.  I am sorry—­I am, indeed.”

“I don’t quite understand.  You ask me to forgive you—­but what question is there of forgiveness?  You had a perfect right to your opinion, and I was glad to have it at last from you, frankly.”

“But it offended you, Elfrida.  It is what is accountable for the—­the rupture between us.”

“Perhaps.  But not because it hurt my feelings,” Elfrida returned scornfully, “in the ordinary sense.  It offended me truly; but in quite another way.  In what you said you put me on a different plane from yourself in the matter of artistic execution.  Very well.  I am content to stay there—­in your opinion.  But why this talk of forgiveness?  Neither of us can alter anything.  Only,” Elfrida breathed quickly, “be sure that I will not be accepted by you upon those terms.”

“That, wasn’t what I meant in the least.”

“What else could you have meant?  And more than that,” Elfrida went on rapidly—­her phrases had the patness of formed conclusions—­“what you said betrayed a totally different conception of art, as it expresses itself in the nudity of things, from the one I supposed you to hold.  And, if you will pardon me for saying so, a much lower one.  It seems to me that we cannot hold together there—­that our aims and creeds are different, and that we have been comrades under false pretences.  Perhaps we are both to blame for that; but we cannot change it, or the fact that we have found it out.”

Janet bit her lip.  The “nudity of things” brought her an instant’s impulse toward hysteria—­it was so characteristic a touch of candid exaggeration.  But her need for reflection helped her to control it.  Elfrida had taken a different ground from the one she expected—­it was less simple, and a mere apology, however sincere, would not meet it.  But there was one thing more which she could say, and with an effort she said it.

“Elfrida, suppose that, even as an expression of opinion—­putting it aside as an expression of feeling toward you—­what I said that day was not quite sincere.  Suppose that I was not quite mistress of myself—­I would rather not tell you why—­”