'Ah, that's just it,' said Gerald, as if, now, they had reached the centre of his difficulty; 'and I can't pretend to be, either. I can't pretend to be like Mr. Kane. Imagine that quaint little fellow going up to meet her. You must own it's rather grotesque—rather tasteless, too, I think, under the circumstances.'
'They are very old friends.'
'Well, but after all, he's Althea's rejected suitor.'
'It wasn't as a suitor, it was as a friend he went. The fact that she rejected him doesn't make him any less her friend, or any less solicitous about her.'
'It makes me look silly, her rejected suitor showing more solicitude than I do—unless it makes him look silly; I rather feel it's that way. But, apart from that, about Althea, I'm really bothered. It's all right, of course; I've brought her round. I laughed at her a little and teased her a little, and told her not to be a dear little goose, you know. But, Helen, deuce take it! the trouble is——' Again Gerald turned and kicked the log, and then, his hands on the mantelpiece, he gazed with frowning intentness into the flames. 'She takes it all so much more seriously than I do,' so he finally brought out his distress; 'so much more seriously than I can, you know. It's all right, of course; only one doesn't know quite how to get on.' And now, turning to Helen, he found her eyes on his, and her silence became significant to him. There was no response in her eyes; they were veiled, mute; they observed him; they told him nothing. And he had a sense, new to him and quite inexpressibly painful, of being shut out. 'I may go on talking to you—about everything—as I have always done, Helen?' he said. It was hardly a question; he couldn't really dream that there was anything not to be talked out with Helen. But there was. Gerald received one of the ugliest shocks of his life when Helen said to him in her careful voice: 'You may not talk about Althea to me; not about her feeling for you—or yours for her.'
There was a pause after this, and then Gerald got out: 'I say—Helen!' on a long breath, staring at her. 'You mean——' he stammered a little.
'That you owe it to Althea—just because we had to talk her over once, before you were sure that you wanted to make her your wife—not to discuss her feelings or her relation to you with anybody, now that she is to be your wife. I should think you would see that for yourself, Gerald. I should think you would see that Althea would not marry you if she thought that you were capable of talking her over with me.'
Gerald had flushed deeply and vividly. 'But Helen—with you!' he murmured. It was a helpless appeal, a helpless protest. His whole life seemed to rise up and confront her with the contrast between their reality—his relation and hers—and the relative triviality of this new episode in his life. And there was his error, and there her inexorable opposition; the episode was one no longer; he must not treat it as trivial, a matter for mutual musings and conjectures. His 'With you!' shook Helen's heart; but, looking past him and hard at the fire, she only moved her head in slow, slight, and final negation.
Gerald was silent for a long time, and she knew that he was gazing at her as a dog gazes when some inexorable and inexplicable refusal turns its world to emptiness. And with her pain for his pain came the rising of old anger and old irony against him; for whose fault was it that even the bitter joy of perfect freedom was cut off? Who had been so blind as not to see that a wife must, in common loyalty, bring circumspection and a careful drawing of limits? Who was it who, in his folly, had not known that his impulsive acquiescence, his idle acceptance of the established comfort and order held out to him, had cut away half of their friendship? Absurd for Gerald, now, to feel reproach and injury. For when he spoke again it was, though in careful tones, with uncontrollable reproach. 'You know, Helen, I never expected this. I don't know that I'd have been able to face this——' He checked himself; already he had learned something of what was required of him. 'It's like poisoning part of my life for me.'
Helen did not allow the bitter smile to curl her lips; her inner rejoinder answered him with: 'Whose fault is it that all my life is poisoned?'