I considered two or three ways of meeting this, the one I adopted being to put on a rather inane smile.
“What if she did?”
“She’d just have to get over it, that’s all. You, too!”
“Why?”
“I needn’t tell you why. You must see for yourself. Or, rather, I’ve told you already. There are ways in which an engagement is more important than a marriage—any engagement; and when it’s a second engagement to the same man—If she’d been married to him, and couldn’t get along, why, no one would think the worse of her if she got a divorce and married some one else. She would have given him a try; she would have done her best. But just to take him up and put him down, and take him up and put him down again, without trying him at all—my dear Frank, it isn’t done!”
“But suppose we did it?”
“In that case it might be the world well lost for love—but the world would be lost; and you needn’t be under any misconception about it. Personally I’d stand by any one through almost anything; I have stood by Regina in the past when lots of other women have given her the cold shoulder because of her—”
“Call it anything you like. Most of us have other names for it. All I want to say now is that I wouldn’t stand by her in this; nor by you, either. If you had come to me when you were in your other troubles—three or four years ago—you’d have found me just the same as if you’d been keeping straight. Any one can go to the bad. There isn’t a family that hasn’t some one who’s done it. But this would be the kind of thing— Frank, old boy, I’m telling you right now, so that you’ll know where you stand with me. I’d have to be the first to cut you both.”
To this there were several retorts I could have made, any of them quite crushing to Annette; but I was thinking of the practical difficulties before us. The rôle of unscrupulous coquette was the last in which Regina would care to appear; that of cad was equally distasteful to me. Had it been possible to make one plunge and be over with it, it would have been different; as it was, the preliminaries—the facing of all the people who would have to be faced—the explaining all the things that would have to be explained—couldn’t but be devilish.