“Don’t, please don’t,” she implored. “I can’t let you.”
His arms were trembling and on his face she read dismay. “But have you never loved me?” he demanded, “all these months?”
“I am an impatient person, Mauney,” she replied, freeing herself from his arms. “With me love must be romance or nothing. I must be taken when the fire burns in my heart. I can’t control it. All I know is that somehow you missed it. And now I cannot—come to you.”
Mauney, plunging his hands into his pockets, wheeled suddenly towards the window and stood for a long moment in puzzled meditation.
“Do you love Courtney?” he asked suddenly, glancing towards her.
“That question,” she replied, “seems somehow to be outside the rights of our present conversation.”
Her face, which had been pale, flushed a little. “If you are going to demand too many explanations, then I’ll ask you how it was possible for you to put Max Lee between us?”
“Why, Freda,” he began.
“And don’t you think,” she interrupted, “that, if you are quite frank with yourself, you’ll admit that you played with me a little longer than I could be expected to stand?”
He did not reply.