“He says he’s trying to, doesn’t he?  But between us, Patty, my child, you won’t forget what you have to say to the old man, will you?”

“What have I to say?  Oh, you mean about standing by his friends?”

“That’s just it.  You tell him from yours truly that the best thing he can do all round is to stick fast to his friends.”

“And that means the strikers?”

“It means what I tell you.”

“Well, I’ll repeat exactly what you say; it won’t make any difference if his mind is made up.”

“Maybe so.  Are you going to tell him where you’ve been?”

“I don’t know.  I hate to worry him; but that poor woman must need help.”

“Oh, she needs it.  We all need it,” remarked Gershom flippantly.  Then, as they reached the entrance to the Square, he held out his hand.  “Well, I’m off now, and I hope you aren’t feeling any worse because of your visit.  The world ain’t made of honeycomb, you know, and there’s no use pretending it is.  But you’re a darn good sport, Patty.  You’re as good a sport as I ever struck up with in this little affair of life.”

CHAPTER XVIII

MYSTIFICATION

Walking slowly home across the Square, Patty told herself that the future had been taken out of her hands.  She seemed to have been moved mentally, if not bodily, into another world, into a world where the sleepy old Square, wrapped in a soft afternoon haze, still existed, but from which Stephen Culpeper had vanished in a rosy cloud.  She did not know why she had relinquished the thought of Stephen since her visit to the house in East Leigh Street; but some deep instinct warned her that she had widened the gulf between them by her excursion with Gershom.  “I can’t help it,” she thought sensibly enough.  “There wasn’t anything in it before that, and I might as well go ahead and stop thinking about it.”  Her anger at Stephen’s neglect had melted into a vague and impersonal resentment, a resentment, rather for the dying woman than for herself, against all the needless cruelties of life.  Even Gershom, even the unspeakable Gershom, had had discernment enough to see that something good in that poor woman had been blighted and crushed.  Was it true that no one was ever given the chance to be one’s best?  Was this true, not only of that dying woman, but of her father and Stephen and Corinna and herself and all human beings everywhere?

Lingering a moment near the Washington monument, she stood watching the straggling groups that were crossing the Square.  Bit by bit, snatches of conversation drifted into her mind and then blew out again, leaving scarcely the shadow of an impression.  “They tell me it’s going up.  I don’t know, but I’ll find out to-morrow.”  “I wouldn’t wear one of those things for a million dollars, and he says—­” “Yes, I’ve arranged to go unless the strike should be called next week.”