'However well you knew him, you do know that under no circumstances could you marry him.'
'No, I suppose not.'
Her look of readjustment was inflicting further and subtler wounds.
'Can't I feel in the same way?' said Althea.
Helen, a little troubled by the feeling she could not interpret in her friend's voice, hesitated before saying—as though in atonement to Mr. Kane she felt bound to put his case as favourably as possible: 'It doesn't quite follow, does it, that somebody who would suit you would suit me? We are so different, aren't we?'
'Different? How?'
'Well, I could put up with a very inferior, frivolous sort of person. You'd have higher ideas altogether.'
Althea still tried to smile. 'You mean that Franklin is too high an idea for you?'
'Far, far too high,' said Helen, smiling back.
Franklin and Miss Buckston were now approaching them, and Althea had to accept this ambiguous result of the conversation. One result, however, was not ambiguous. She seemed to see Franklin, as he came towards her over the thick sward, in a new light, a light that diminished and removed him; so that while her heart ached over him as it had never ached, it yet, strangely, was hardened towards him, and almost hostile. How had she not seen for herself, clearly and finally, that she and Helen were alike, and that whether it was that Franklin was too high, or whether it was that Franklin was merely funny—for either or for both reasons, Franklin could never be for her.