“You said they’d lose you.”
“Only, if you married me,” he reminded her.
But she remembered more accurately. “No. They’d lose you anyway. You said so. You said that if they could ever see you again it would make it too blatantly a fake. And it’s true. I see it now. How could you turn up quietly, as if nothing had happened, after Barney had divorced me with you as co-respondent? There’s Lady Cockerell,” said Adrienne, and, though she was so grave, so troubled, it was with a touch of mild malice. “There’s Mr. Bodman and Johnson, to say nothing of Mrs. Chadwick and Nancy’s mother. No, I really don’t see you facing them all at Coldbrooks after we’d come out in the ‘Daily Mail’ with head-lines and pictures.”
Her lucidity could indeed disconcert him when it sharpened itself like this with the apt use of his vocabulary. He had to stop to think.
“There won’t, at all events, be pictures,” he paused by the triviality to remark. “We shan’t appear. It will be an hotel over here and the case will be undefended. We needn’t, really, consider all that too closely. At the worst, if they do lose me, it’s not a devastating loss. They’ll have each other.”
“Ah, but who will you have?” Adrienne inquired. “Hamilton will have Carola and they will have each other. But who will you have?”
He lay and looked at her. There was only one answer to that question and he could not make it. He was aware of the insufficiency of his substitute. “I’d have your friendship,” he said.
“You have that now,” said Adrienne. “And though I’m so your friend, I’ll be leaving you, soon, probably for ever. We’ll probably never meet again, Mr. Oldmeadow. Our paths lie so apart, don’t they? My friendship will do you very little good.”
Her words cut into him, but he kept a brave countenance. “I’d have the joy of knowing I’d done something worth while for you. How easily I might have died here, if it hadn’t been for you. My life is yours in a sense and I want you to use it rather than Hamilton’s. I have my work, you know; lots of things I’m interested in to go back to some day. As you remarked, a divorced wife can run soup-kitchens and in the same way a co-respondent can write articles and go to concerts.”
“I know. I know what a fine, big life you have,” she murmured, and the trouble on her face had deepened. “But how can I take it from you? A felony? How can I let you do, for my sake, something you feel to be so wrong?”