"Why," said Dick, "you'd disappeared. You'd gone away from here, and you were lost, virtually lost. You weren't anywhere."
"If she thought I was in New York, why didn't that settle it? What did she have to go trailing on after me for?"
"Because," said Dick, "we didn't know. She wanted to telephone. I wouldn't let her. I couldn't have the Seaburys started up. I couldn't have you get into the papers."
"Into the papers!" said Nan. "Heavens! I suppose if I'm not in at curfew I'm to be arrested."
"I let her go," repeated Dick. "But I knew as well as I wanted to you'd doubled back here and you were with him."
"Then, for God's sake," said Nan, in a conversational tone, knowing the adjuration would be bitter to him, "if I wanted to be with him, as you put it—I'm glad I ain't a poet—why didn't you let me?"
"Because," said Dick promptly, "it's indecent."
She had no difficulty in facing him now. It was a cheap means of subjugating, but, being an advantage, she would not forego it. And, indeed, she was too angry.
"Dick," she said, "you're a sickening little whelp. More than that, you're a hypocrite. You write yards and yards of your free verse to tell us how bold and brave you are and how generally go-as-you-please we've got to be if we're going to play big Injun, and then you tell me it's indecent to sit here with Rookie, of all people in the world. My God! Rookie!"
Again she had invoked her Maker because Dick would shiver at the impropriety. "No violence," she thought satirically, remembering he was himself the instigator of violence in verse. But Dick was sorry. He had not chosen his word. It had lain in his angry mind and leaped to be used. It could not be taken back.