"My God, Sidney, I'm asking you to marry me!"
"I--I know that. I am asking you something else, Max."
"I have never been in love with her."
His voice was sulky. He had drawn the car close to a bank, and they were
sitting in the shade, on the grass. It was the Sunday afternoon after
Sidney's experience in the operating-room.
"You took her out, Max, didn't you?"
"A few times, yes. She seemed to have no friends. I was sorry for her."
"That was all?"
"Absolutely. Good Heavens, you've put me through a catechism in the last
ten minutes!"
"If my father were living, or even mother, I--one of them would have done
this for me, Max. I'm sorry I had to. I've been very wretched for several
days."
It was the first encouragement she had given him. There was no coquetry
about her aloofness. It was only that her faith in him had had a shock and
was slow of reviving.
"You are very, very lovely, Sidney. I wonder if you have any idea what you
mean to me?"
"You meant a great deal to me, too," she said frankly, "until a few days
ago. I thought you were the greatest man I had ever known, and the best.
And then--I think I'd better tell you what I overheard. I didn't try to
hear. It just happened that way."
He listened doggedly to her account of the hospital gossip, doggedly and
with a sinking sense of fear, not of the talk, but of Carlotta herself.
Usually one might count on the woman's silence, her instinct for
self-protection. But Carlotta was different. Damn the girl, anyhow! She
had known from the start that the affair was a temporary one; he had never
pretended anything else.
There was silence for a moment after Sidney finished. Then: "You are not a child any longer, Sidney. You have learned a great deal in
this last year. One of the things you know is that almost every man has
small affairs, many of them sometimes, before he finds the woman he wants
to marry. When he finds her, the others are all off--there's nothing to
them. It's the real thing then, instead of the sham."
"Palmer was very much in love with Christine, and yet--"
"Palmer is a cad."
"I don't want you to think I'm making terms. I'm not. But if this thing
went on, and I found out afterward that you--that there was anyone else, it
would kill me."