If I go up-stairs
the moment I get in and cry till I can't take my dancing lesson,
you are responsible, mind!'
'Let us be friends, Rosa.'
'Ah!' cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real tears, 'I
wish we COULD be friends! It's because we can't be friends, that
we try one another so. I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have an
old heartache; but I really, really have, sometimes. Don't be
angry. I know you have one yourself too often. We should both of
us have done better, if What is to be had been left What might have
been. I am quite a little serious thing now, and not teasing you.
Let each of us forbear, this one time, on our own account, and on
the other's!'
Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman's nature in the spoilt child,
though for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming to involve
the enforced infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands
watching her as she childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to
the handkerchief at her eyes, and then--she becoming more composed,
and indeed beginning in her young inconstancy to laugh at herself
for having been so moved--leads her to a seat hard by, under the
elm-trees.
'One clear word of understanding, Pussy dear. I am not clever out
of my own line--now I come to think of it, I don't know that I am
particularly clever in it--but I want to do right. There is not--
there may be--I really don't see my way to what I want to say, but
I must say it before we part--there is not any other young--'
'O no, Eddy! It's generous of you to ask me; but no, no, no!'
They have come very near to the Cathedral windows, and at this
moment the organ and the choir sound out sublimely.
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