Alicia laid a detaining hand upon Miss Howe’s skirt.  “Don’t go away,” she said.  Hilda sat at the other end of the sofa; there was hardly a foot between them.  She went on with a curious excitement.

“My kind of life is so primitive, so simple; it is one pure impulse, you don’t know.  One only asks the things that minister—­ one goes and finds and takes them; one’s feet in the straw, one’s head under any roof.  What difference does it make?  The only thing that counts, that rules, is the chance of seeing something else, feeling something more, doing something better.”

Alicia only looked at her and tightened the grasp of her fingers on the actress’s skirt.  Hilda made the slightest, most involuntary movement.  It comprehended the shaking off of hindrance, the action of flight.  Then she glanced about her again with a kind of appraisement, which ended with Alicia and embraced her.  What she realised seemed to urge her, I think, in some weak place of her sex, to go on intensely, almost fiercely.

“Everything here is aftermath.  You are a gleaner, Alicia Livingstone.  We leave it all over the world for people of taste, like you, in the glow of their illusions.  I couldn’t make you understand our harvest; it is of the broad sun and the sincerity of things.”

“I know I must seem to you dreadfully out of it,” Alicia said, wearing, as it were, across her heaviness a lighter cloud of trouble.

But the other would not be stayed; she followed by compulsion her impulse to the end.  “Shall I be quite candid?” she said.  “I find the atmosphere about you, dear, a trifle exhausted.”

Alicia with a face of astonishment made a half movement towards the window before she understood.  There was some timidity in her glance at Hilda and in her mechanical smile.  “Oh,” she said, “I see what you mean; and I don’t wonder.  I am so literal—­I have so little imagination.”

“Don’t talk of it as if it were money or fabric—­something you could add up or measure,” Hilda cried remorselessly.  “You have none!”

As if something slipped from her Alicia threw out locked hands.  “At least I had enough to know you when you came!” she cried.  “I felt you, too, and it’s not my fault if there isn’t enough of me to—­to respond properly.  And I can’t give you up.  You seem to be the one valuable thing that I can have—­the only permanent fact that is left.”

Hilda had a rebound of immense discomfort.  “Who said anything about giving up?” she interrupted.

“Why, you did!  But I’m quite willing to believe you didn’t mean it, if you say so.”  She turned the appeal of her face and saw a sudden pitiful consideration in Hilda’s, and as if it called them forth two tears sprang to her eyes and fell, as she lowered her delicate head upon her lap.