Pitiable illusion!
"No, you couldn't have been," he said, suddenly gentle. "Don't think that. . . . And you're very sweet and dear as you are."
"I? I?" she asked, with a sort of terror.
He was now utterly defeated, committed to the endless assuagement of this hapless creature.
"Very well!" he said to himself, resigned and weary. "Apparently I haven't the moral courage to drown Miss Flotsam. And there's no point in half-drowning her. I shall have to be humane—to breaking point."
He suggested turning back, and his docile companion assented at once.
"But is there a breaking point?" he reflected. "I rather think there's not. Of all extraordinary things, the most extraordinary is the endurance of human beings. There's nothing imaginable we won't suffer without mutiny. Nothing! I'll take on the burden of this very tiresome Miss Flotsam, for no reason at all. I don't like her, certainly I don't admire her. I'm not even sure that I'm especially sorry for her. Simply, she makes a claim on my sympathy, and I'm obliged to acknowledge the claim. I can't help her; I've nothing to give. But I'll be the illusion she wants. I'll be the carrot in front of the donkey's nose. . . ."
His long silence frightened her; she waited, terribly anxious, for his next words. She sweet and dear? Oh, no!
"You didn't mean that, did you?" she asked, and her effort to sound careless and gay was a shocking failure.
"Yes!" he almost shouted. "Yes! I did!"
"Oh, but why?" she asked. "What makes you think that?"
To save his life, he could invent nothing plausible, and she kept on, desperate for reassurance, for a repetition of those words incredible and exquisite.
"I'd just like to know what you think is nice about me," she entreated.
"Nothing!" he thought, ready to laugh at the insufferable farce. And, in lieu of spoken words, laid a hand on her arm. To his consternation, both her hands clasped his, she was trembling and cold.
"I can be a friend . . ." she said. "I know—I know what it means to be lonely and—I'll be the best friend you ever had."
He was shaken with bitter mirth, grinning to himself in the dark,
