For it did
not seem possible to Janet that a hopeless passion for
a being like Elfrida Bell could result in anything but
collapse. Whenever he came to Kensington Square, and he
came often, she went down to meet him with a quaking
heart, and sought his face nervously for the haggard,
broken look which should mean that he had asked Elfrida
to marry him and been artistically refused. Always she
looked in vain; indeed, Kendal's spirits were so uniformly
like a schoolboy's that once or twice she asked herself,
with sudden terror, whether Elfrida had deceived
her--whether it might not be otherwise between them,
recognizing then, with infinite humiliation, how much
worse that would be. She took to working extravagantly
hard, and Elfrida noticed with distinct pleasure how much
warmer her manner had grown, and in how many pretty ways
she showed her enthusiasm. Janet was such a conquest!
Once when Kendal seemed to Janet on the point of asking
her what she thought of his chances, she went to a
florist's in the High, and sent Elfrida a pot of snowy
chrysanthemums, after which she allowed herself to refrain
from seeing her for a week. Her talk with her father
about helping Elfrida to place her work with the magazines
had been one of the constant impulses by which she tried
to compensate her friend, as it were, for the amount of
suffering that young woman was inflicting upon her--she
would have found a difficulty in explaining it more
intelligibly than that.
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