Her voice was too successful; Helen still suspected nothing. 'Yes,' she said. 'Really.'
'You mustn't judge him from his appearance,' said Althea, smiling, for Helen had now opened her eyes and was looking dreamily at the lawn-tennis players.' His clothes are odd, of course; he doesn't know how to dress; but his eyes are fine; one sees the thinker in them.' She hoped by sacrificing Franklin's clothes to elicit some appreciation of his eyes. But Helen merely acquiesced again with: 'Yes; he doesn't know how to dress.'
'He isn't at all well off, you know,' said Althea. 'Indeed, he is quite poor. He spends most of his money on research and philanthropy.'
'Ah, well!' Helen commented, 'it's extraordinary how little difference money makes if a man knows how to dress.'
The thought of Gerald Digby went like a dart through Althea's mind. He was poor. She remembered his socks and ties, his general rightness. She wondered how much he spent on his clothes. She was silent for a moment, struggling with her trivial and with her deep discomfitures, and she saw the figures of Miss Buckston and of Franklin—both so funny, both so earnest—appear at the farther edge of the lawn engaged in strenuous converse. Helen looked at them too, kindly and indifferently. 'That would be quite an appropriate attachment, wouldn't it?' she remarked. 'They seem very much interested in each other, those two.'
Althea grew very red. Her mind knew a horrid wrench. She did not know whether it was in pride of possessorship, or shame of it, or merely in helpless loyalty that, after a pause, she said: 'Perhaps I ought to have told you, Helen, that Franklin has wanted to marry me for fifteen years. I've no intention of accepting him; but no one can judge as I can of how big and dear a person he is—in spite of his funniness.' As she spoke she remembered—it was with a gush of undiluted dismay—that to Helen she had in Paris spoken of the 'delightful' suitor, the 'only one.' Did Helen remember? And how could Helen connect that delightful 'one' with Franklin, and with her own attitude towards Franklin?
But Helen now had turned her eyes upon her, opening them—it always seemed to be with difficulty that she did it—widely. 'My dear,' she said, 'I do beg your pardon. You never gave me a hint.'
How, indeed, could the Paris memory have been one?
'There wasn't any hint to give, exactly,' said Althea, blushing more deeply and trying to prevent the tears from rising. 'I'm not in the least in love with Franklin. I never shall be.'
'No, of course not,' Helen replied, full of solicitude. 'Only, as you say, you must know him so well;—to have him talked over, quite idly and ignorantly, as I've been talking.—Really, you ought to have stopped me.'