'Will you make coffee, Louisa?' she asked. Louisa lifted herself, looked
at her friend, and stretched slightly.
'Oh!' she groaned voluptuously. 'This is so comfortable!' 'Don't trouble then, I'll go. No, don't get up,' said Helena, trying to
disengage herself. Louisa reached and put her hands on Helena's wrists.
'I will go,' she drawled, almost groaning with voluptuousness and
appealing love.
Then, as Helena still made movements to rise, the elder woman got up
slowly, leaning as she did so all her weight on her friend.
'Where is the coffee?' she asked, affecting the dullness of lethargy.
She was full of small affectations, being consumed with uneasy love.
'I think, my dear,' replied Helena, 'it is in its usual place.' 'Oh--o-o-oh!' yawned Louisa, and she dragged herself out.
The two had been intimate friends for years, had slept together, and
played together and lived together. Now the friendship was coming to
an end.
'After all,' said Byrne, when the door was closed, 'if you're alive
you've got to live.' Helena burst into a titter of amusement at this sudden remark.
'Wherefore?' she asked indulgently.
'Because there's no such thing as passive existence,' he replied,
grinning.
She curled her lip in amused indulgence of this very young man.
'I don't see it at all,' she said.
'You can't, he protested, 'any more than a tree can help budding in
April--it can't help itself, if it's alive; same with you.' 'Well, then'--and again there was the touch of a sneer--'if I can't help
myself, why trouble, my friend?' 'Because--because I suppose _I_ can't help myself--if it bothers me, it
does. You see, I'--he smiled brilliantly--'am April.' She paid very little attention to him, but began in a peculiar reedy,
metallic tone, that set his nerves quivering: 'But I am not a bare tree. All my dead leaves, they hang to me--and--and
go through a kind of _danse macabre_--' 'But you bud underneath--like beech,' he said quickly.
'Really, my friend,' she said coldly, 'I am too tired to bud.' 'No,' he pleaded, 'no!' With his thick brows knitted, he surveyed her
anxiously. She had received a great blow in August, and she still was
stunned. Her face, white and heavy, was like a mask, almost sullen. She
looked in the fire, forgetting him.
'You want March,' he said--he worried endlessly over her--'to rip off
your old leaves. I s'll have to be March,' he laughed.
She ignored him again because of his presumption. He waited awhile, then
broke out once more.