'I know Helen. She has always been quite frank about her mercenary ideas. She always told me she would marry a man for his money.'
'Then why do you say it's incredible that she is going to?'
Why, indeed? but Althea held her lash. 'I did not believe, even of her, that she would marry a man she considered so completely insignificant, so completely negligible—a man she described to me as a funny little man. There are limits, even to Helen's insensitiveness, I should have imagined.'
She had discovered the raw. Gerald was breathing hard.
'That must have been at first—when she didn't know him. They became great friends; everybody saw that Helen had become very fond of him; I never knew her to be so fond of anybody. You are merely angry because a man who used to be in love with you has fallen in love with another woman.'
So he, too, could lash. 'How dare you, Gerald!' she said.
At her voice he paused, and there, in the wet road, they stood and looked at each other.
What Althea then saw in his face plunged her into the nightmare abyss of nothingness. What had she left? He did not love her—he did not even care for her. She had lost the real love, and this brightness that she clung to darkened for her. He looked at her, steadily, gloomily, ashamed of what she had made him say, yet too sunken in his own pain, too indifferent to hers, to unsay it. And in her dispossession she did not dare make manifest the severance that she saw. He did not care for her, but she could not tell him so; she could not tell him to go. With horrid sickness of heart she made a feint that hid her knowledge.
'What you say is not true. Franklin does not love her. I know him through and through. I am the great love of his life; even in his letter to me, here, he tells me that I am.'
'Well, since you've thrown him over, he can console himself, I hope.'