The confession touched her, and she answered impulsively:  “Well, that’s just what I want to be to you—­a good friend.”

He laughed, but his eyes shone as he looked down on her.  “If you’d only take the trouble.”

“It won’t be any trouble—­not a bit of it.  After your goodness to me, how could I help being your friend?”

Lifting her eyes she would have met his squarely while she spoke, but he was not looking at her—­he appeared, indeed, to be looking almost obstinately away from her.

“There wasn’t anything in what I did,” he responded in a barely audible voice, and she understood that he was embarrassed by her gratitude.

“But there was something in it—­there was a great deal in it,” she insisted.  It was so easy to be natural with a man, so easy to be candid and sincere when there was no question of sentiment, and, she thought almost gratefully of the elusive and mysterious Alice.  The faintest suggestion of romance would have spoiled things in the beginning; but thanks to the hidden Alice, she might be as kind and frank as she pleased.  Besides, she was nearly thirty-eight, and a woman of thirty-eight might certainly be trusted to make a friend of a man of forty-five.

With this thought, over which the memory of Arthur brooded benevolently, in her mind, she said warmly:  “It will make so much difference to me, too, having a real friend in New York.”

He turned to her with a start.  “Do you mean that I could make a difference to you?”

“The greatest difference, of course,” she rejoined brightly, eager to convince him of his importance in her life.  “I can’t tell you—­you would never understand how lonely I get at times, and now with the children away it is worse than ever—­the loneliness, I mean, and the feeling that there isn’t anybody one could turn to in trouble.”

For a minute he appeared to ponder this deeply.  “Well, you could always come to me if you needed anything,” he answered at last, and she felt intuitively that for some reason he was distrustful either of himself or of her.  “I am not here very much of my time, but whenever I am, I am entirely at your service.”

“But that’s only half of it.”  She was determined to reassure him.  “A friendship can’t be one-sided, can it?  And it isn’t fair when you give everything, that I should give nothing.”

His scruples surrendered immediately to her argument.  “You give everything—­you give happiness,” he said—­a strange speech certainly from the twilight lover of Alice.  However, as she reasoned clearly after her first perplexity, men were often strange when one least expected or desired strangeness.  At thirty-seven, whatever else life had denied her, she felt that it had granted her a complete understanding of men; and it was out of this complete understanding that she observed brightly after a minute: 

“Well, if you feel that way, we are obliged to be friends.”  At least she would prove by her frankness that she was not one of those foolish women who are always taking things seriously.