“If that’s what she wants.”
“It’s what every woman wants, so they say. They just ask to be loved; and when you love them enough—” He uttered a little shrill laugh, in which there was a touch of the hysterical that was always somewhere about him. “God! Frank, it’s wonderful! Even you who know her can’t imagine what it means to a lonely bloke like me.”
I pumped myself up to a great effort.
“Suppose”—I had to moisten my lips before going on—“suppose she was to play you the same trick she played you before?”
“She wouldn’t.”
In spite of his evident conviction, I pressed the question.
“But if she did?”
He threw off in a tone that seemed careless: “In that case there’d be just one thing for me to do. I’d leave her everything I possess—I’m doing that as it is—and, well, you can guess the rest. I—I couldn’t go through all that again. The first time—well, I just pulled it off; but the second—”
It was the old story. They all seemed to have the second time on the brain. I, too, was getting it on the brain. It was like a trip-hammer pounding in my head.
I forced myself, however, to make some foolish, semi-jovial speech in which there was no congratulation, begging him, then, for the love of Heaven, to clear out, as I wanted to go to sleep.