“Oh!” said Rachel, ruefully.  “When you say that I know it is the prelude to something frightful.  You are getting out a dagger, and I shall be its sheath directly.”

“You are a true prophet, Rachel.”

“Yes, executioner.”

“My dear, dear friend, whom I love best in the world, when that happened my heart was wrung for you.  I would have given everything I had, life itself—­not that that is saying much—­to have saved you from that hour.”

“I know it.”

“But I should have been the real enemy if I had had power to save you, which, thank God!  I had not.  That hour had to be.  It was necessary.  You may not care about your own character, but I do.  There is something stubborn and inflexible in you—­the seamy side of your courage and steadfastness—­which cannot readily enter into the feelings of others or put itself in their place.  I think it is want of imagination—­I mean the power of seeing things as they are.  You are the kind of woman who, if you had married comfortably some one you rather liked, might have become like Sybell Loftus, who never understands any feeling beyond her own microscopic ones, and who measures love by her own small preference for Doll.  You would have had no more sympathy than she has.  People, like Sybell, believe one can only sympathize with what one has experienced.  That is why they are always saying, ‘as a mother,’ or ‘as a wife.’  If that were true the world would have to get on without sympathy, for no two people have the same experience.  Only a shallow nature believes that a resemblance in two cups means that they both contain the same wine.  Sybell believes it, and you would have been very much the same, not from lack of perception, as in her case, but from want of using your powers of perception.  If you had not undergone an agonized awakening, all the great realities of life—­love, hatred, temptation, enthusiasm—­would have remained for you as they have remained for Sybell, merely pretty words to string on light conversation.  That is why I can’t bear to hear her speak of them, because every word she says proves she has not known them.  But the sword that pierced your heart forced an entrance for angels, who had been knocking where there was no door—­until then.”

Silence.

“Since when is it that people have turned to you for comfort and sympathy?”

No answer.

“Rachel, on your oath, did you ever really care for the London poor until you became poor yourself, and lived among them?”

“No.”

“But they were there all the time.  You saw them in the streets.  It was not as if you only heard of them.  You saw them.  Their agony, their vice, was written large on their faces.  There was a slum almost at the back of that great house in Portman Square where you lived many years in luxury with your parents.”

“Don’t,” said Rachel, her lip trembling.

“I must.  You did not care then.  If a flagrant case came before you you gave something like other uncharitable people who hate feeling uncomfortable.  But you care now.  You seek out those who need you.  Answer me.  Were they cheaply bought or not, that compassion and love for the degraded and the suffering which were the outcome of your years of poverty in Museum Buildings?”