Gerald had flushed. 'I know I'm behaving caddishly. I've no right to say anything until I see Althea.'
'Well, perhaps not,' Franklin conceded.
'But, you know,' said Gerald, groping too, 'it's not as if it were really sudden—the Althea side of it, I mean. We've not hit it off at all. I've disappointed her frightfully; it will be a relief to her, I know—to hear'—Gerald stammered a little—'that I see now, as clearly as she does, that we couldn't be happy together. Of course,' and he grew still more red, 'it will be she who throws me over. And—I think I'd better go to her at once.'
'Wait, Gerald,' said Helen.
He paused in his precipitate dash to the door. Only her gaze, till now, had told of the chaos within her; but when Gerald said that he was going to Althea, she found words. 'Wait a moment. I don't think that you understand. I don't think, as Franklin says, that you see some things at all. Do you realise what you are doing?'
Gerald stood, his hand on the door knob, and looked at her. 'Yes; I realise it perfectly.'
'Do you realise that it will not change me and that I think you are behaving outrageously?'
'Even if it won't change you I'd have to do it now. I can't marry another woman when I'm in love with you.'
'Can't you? When you know that you can never marry me?'
'Even if I know that,' said Gerald, staring at her and, with his deepening sense of complications, looking, for him, almost stern.