“I know she does,” sighed Vail.
He got up abruptly to leave the room. But Miss Gregg would not have it so.
“Thax,” she said, “you remember that would-be smart thing Willis Chase said, the evening of the burglary? He said that when a policeman blows out his brains and survives they make him a detective. Well, here’s something a hundred times truer: When Providence wishes to extract a man’s few brains more or less painlessly and to make him several thousand degrees worse than useless He makes him fall in love. That is not an epigram. It is better. It’s a truth.... Thax, do you realize you’ve been making my little girl very unhappy indeed?”
“I?” blithered Vail. “Making Doris unhappy? Why, Miss Gregg, I—!”
“Oh, don’t apologize. She enjoys it. A girl in love, without being divinely unhappy, would feel she was defrauded of Heaven’s best gift. Doris—”
“But I don’t understand!” protested the miserable Vail. “How on earth have I made—?”
“Principally by being mooncalfishly and objectionably in love with her,” said Miss Gregg, “and not taking the trouble to tell her so.”
“But how can I? In the first place, Clive loves her. He’s never loved any one else. (Neither have I for that matter. I got into the habit when I was a boy, and I can’t break it.) He’s lying sick and helpless here under my roof. It wouldn’t be playing the game to—”
“Love is no more a ‘game’ than a train wreck is!” scoffed Miss Gregg. “If you weren’t a lover, and therefore a moron, you’d know that. It—”
“Besides,” he blurted despairingly, “what would be the use? She loves him. I can tell she does. Why, you just said yourself she—”