She took him up with unexpected comprehension.
"I think I can understand that. It has always seemed to me that it is not the people who have suffered who sympathize ... they understand, if you know what I mean, but they aren't just sorry like the people who haven't had any sorrows of their own to spend their pity on...."
She broke off abruptly, and with equal abruptness Anstice suspended operations to ask, with a solicitude which belied his earlier speech, whether he were hurting her very badly.
"No ... not at all ... at least, hardly at all," she answered honestly. "I was just wishing I could explain myself better. Now take Mrs. Carstairs, for instance." Iris knew that Chloe had told Anstice her story. "She has suffered as very few people like her have to do, but I don't think it has made her exactly what you call sympathetic."
"That is just what I mean," said Anstice. "Somehow I think suffering is apt to destroy one's nerve of sympathy for others. It atrophies, withers away in the blast of one's personal tragedy; and although Mrs. Carstairs might be able to enter into the feelings of another unhappy woman more fully than--well, than you could do, I think you would be more likely to feel what we call 'sorry for' that woman than she would be."
"I'm glad you agree with me," said Iris slowly. "Dr. Anstice, would you think me very--impertinent--if I say I'm sorry you have been--unhappy--too? I--somehow I always thought you"--she stopped, flushed, but continued bravely--"you looked so sad sometimes I used to wonder if you too had suffered, like poor Mrs. Carstairs."
For a moment Anstice's fingers faltered in their task, and the girl's heart missed a beat as she wondered whether she had said too much.
Then: "Miss Wayne"--Anstice's voice reassured her even while it filled her with a kind of wondering foreboding--"I should never find any impertinence in any interest you might be kind enough to express. I have suffered--bitterly--and the worst of my suffering lies in the fact that others--one other at least besides myself--were involved in the ill I unwittingly wrought."
Again her answer surprised him by the depth of comprehension it conveyed.
"That, too, I can understand," said Iris gently. "I have often tried to imagine how one must feel when one has unknowingly harmed another person; and it has always seemed to me that one would feel as one does when one has spoken unkindly, or impatiently, at least, to a child."