"I don't see that. Give me two or three months, Alix!"
"But it's precisely during those two or three months, Hugh, that I should be left high and dry. Unless I have something to do I have no motive for staying here in New York."
"What about me?"
"I can't stay just to see you. That's the difference between a woman and a man. The situation is awkward enough as it is; but if I were to go on living here for two or three months, merely for the sake of having a few hours every day with you—"
Before we reached the Park he saw the justice of my argument. Remembering what Larry Strangways had once said as to Hugh's belief that he was stooping to pick his diamond out of the mire, I reasoned that since he was marrying a working-girl it would best preserve the decencies if the working-girl were working. For this procedure Hugh himself was able to establish precedent, since we were in sight of the very hotel where Libby Jaynes had rubbed men's nails up to within an hour or two of her marriage to Tracy Allen. He pointed it out as if it was an historic monument, and in the same spirit I gazed at it.
That matter settled, I attacked another as we advanced farther into the Park.
"And Mr. Strangways is not a bounder, Hugh, darling. I wish you wouldn't call him that."
His response was sufficiently good-natured, but it expressed that Brokenshire disdain for everything that didn't have money which specially enraged me.
"Well, I won't," he conceded. "I don't care a hang what he is."
"I do," I declared, with some tartness. "I care that he's a gentleman and that he's treated as one."