Jerry’s eyes were on him while he spoke and they dwelt for some moments of bright contemplation as if for the first time he was looking at Giles more carefully than he had looked at the gas-fire and the mantelpiece. “You know, if I may say so, I do think you’re a very remarkable person,” he observed.
“Am I? Why?” Giles asked, smiling rather sadly.
“Well”—Jerry continued to look at him, but he blushed again—“to care so much about a girl you’re not in love with yourself. Doing everything for her. I’ve heard a lot about you, you may be sure. Alix thinks more of you than of anybody in the world.”
Giles, too, was blushing now. “Does she?” he said. They were suddenly two boys together, and as they spoke of love and of Alix their words, to Giles, seemed to lift her far away out of childhood and to set her, a woman, between them.
“I’m most awfully fond of Alix,” he said.
“I know. That’s what’s so remarkable,” said Jerry, shyly smiling. “To be so fond, yet not to be in love.”
“You see,” Giles found himself offering, really as if in a sort of exculpation, “one may be in love with someone else; that would prevent, wouldn’t it? And you can care immensely about someone without being in love with them.”
“Could one? When she’s Alix? I can’t imagine it,” Jerry a little nervously smiled. “Unless, as you suggest, there’s someone else, and then I shouldn’t have time to care so much for another girl.”
Jerry’s ingenuous analysis certainly had its potency; Giles did not quite know what to say to him. “Even if I had been, it wouldn’t have done me any good,” he suggested. “Alix would never have thought of me.”
“Well, you mustn’t ask me to say that she would!” Jerry laughed out at this.