Which was unfortunate. Marion smiled slowly.
"Oh! But you are good enough for me to be engaged to! I wonder!"
He went to the window and stood for a moment looking out. Then he went
slowly back to her.
"I'm not good enough for you to be engaged to, Marion," he said.
"I--don't you want to call it a day?"
She was really terrified then. She went white and again, miserably, he
mistook her agitation for something deeper.
"You want to break the engagement?"
"Not if you still want me. I only mean--I'm a pretty poor sort. You
ought to have the best, and God help this country if I'm the best."
"Graham, you're in some sort of trouble?"
He drew himself up in boyish bravado. He could not tell her the truth.
It opened up too hideous a vista. Even his consciousness of the fact
that the affair with Anna was still innocent did not dull his full
knowledge of whither it was trending. He was cold and wretched.
"It's nothing," he muttered.
"You can tell me. You can tell me anything. I know a lot, you see. I'm
no silly kitten. If you're in a fix, I'll help you. I don't care what it
is, I'll help you. I? I'm crazy about you, Graham."
Anna's words, too!
"Look here, Marion," he said, roughly, "you've got to do one of two
things. Either marry me or let me go."
"Let you go! I like that. If that is how you feel?"
"Oh--don't." He threw up his arm. "I want you. You know that. Marry
me--to-morrow."
"I will not. Do you think I'm going to come into this family and have
you cut off? Don't you suppose I know that Clayton Spencer hates the
very chair I sit on? He'll come and beg me to marry you, some day. Until
then?"
"You won't do it?"
"To-morrow? Certainly not."
And again he felt desperately his powerlessness to loosen the coils that
were closing round him, fetters forged of his own red blood, his own
youth, the woman-urge.
She was watching him with her calculating glance.
"You must be in trouble," she said.
"If I am, it's you and mother who have driven me there."
He was alarmed then, and lapsed into dogged silence. His anxiety had
forced into speech thoughts that had never before been articulate. He
was astounded to hear himself uttering them, although with the very
speaking he realized now that they were true.