Roland looked at him with a sad patience, as a preparatory schoolmaster at a refractory infant.
“But, my dear fellow, we’re not married, and we’re not engaged. Surely we can do more or less what we like.”
“But would you be pleased if you learned that she’d been carrying on with someone else?”
Roland admitted that he would not.
“Then why should you think you owe nothing to her?”
“It’s different, my dear Ralph; it’s really quite different.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. Boys can do things that girls can’t. A flirtation means very little to a boy; it means a good deal to a girl—at least it ought to. If it doesn’t, it means that she’s had too much of it.”
“But I don’t see——” began Ralph.
“Come on, come on; don’t let’s go all over that again. We shall never agree. Let me go my way and you can go yours. We are too old friends to quarrel about a thing like this.”