“Perhaps not, but it’s the one thing in—in this whole idiotic business that’s on the level—I mean she is. I’d give my right hand to put her back where I found her yesterday—just as she was—but she’s straight.”
She dropped into a chair. The first wild tumult of rage having more or less spent its force, she began, with a kind of heart-broken curiosity, to ask for the facts. She spoke nervously, beating a palm with a gold tassel of her girdle. “Begin at the beginning. Tell me all about it.”
He leaned on the mantelpiece, of which the only ornaments were a child’s head in white and blue terra cotta by Paul Manship, balanced by a pair of old American glass candlesticks, and told the tale as consecutively as he could. He recounted everything, even to the bringing her home, the putting her in the little, back spare-room, and her adoption by Beppo, the red cocker spaniel. By the time he had finished, his heart was a little eased, and some of her tenderness toward him was beginning to flow forth. She was like that, all wrath at one minute, all gentleness the next. Springing to her feet, she caught him by the arm, pressing herself against him.
“All right, Rash. You’ve done it. That’s settled. But it can be undone again.”
He pressed her head back from him, resting the 69 knot of her hair in the hollow of his palm and looking down into her eyes.
“How can it be undone?”
“Oh, there must be ways. A man can’t be allowed to ruin his life—to ruin two lives—for a prank. We’ll just have to think. If you made it worth while for her to take you, you can make it worth while for her to let you go. She’ll do it.”
“She’d do it, of course. She doesn’t care. I’m nothing to her, not any more than she to me. I shan’t see her any more than I can help. I suppose she must stay at the house till—I told Steptoe to look after her.”
She took a position at one end of the mantelpiece, while he faced her from the other. She gave him wise counsel. He was to see his lawyers at once and tell them the whole story. Lawyers always saw the way out of things. There was the Bellington boy who married a show-girl. She had been bought off, and the lawyers had managed it. Now the Bellington boy was happily married to one of the Plantagenet Jones girls and lived at Marillo Park. Then there was the Silliman boy who had married the notorious Kate Cookesley. The lawyers had found the way out of that, too, and now the Silliman boy was a secretary of the American Embassy in Rome. Accidents such as had happened to Rash were regrettable of course, but it would be folly to think that a perfectly good life must be done for just because it had got a crack in it.
“We’ll play the game, of course,” she wound up. “But it’s a game, and the stronger side must win. 70 What should you say of my going to see her—she needn’t know who I am further than that I’m a friend of yours—and finding out for myself?”