For if he had begun as the most
unconscious and merciless of egoists, who could sacrifice little Fifi to
his comfort without a tremor, he had ended with the supreme act of
purest altruism: the voluntary sacrifice of himself to save a man whom
in his heart he must despise.
But was that the supreme altruism? What had it cost him, after all, but
her friendship? Perhaps he did not regard that as so heavy a price to
pay.
Sharlee turned her face to the wall. In the darkness, she felt the color
rising at her throat and sweeping softly but resistlessly upward. And
she found herself feverishly clinging to all that her little Doctor had
said, and looked, in all their meetings which, remembered now, gave her
the right to think that their parting had been hard for him, too.
Yet it was not upon their parting that her mind busied itself most, but
upon thoughts of their remeeting. The relations which she had thought to
exist between them had, it was clear, been violently reversed. The one
point now was for her to meet the topsy-turveyed situation as swiftly,
as generously, and as humbly as was possible.
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