Then something of his meaning began to dawn upon me, and it was with a return of Manner B that I added: “I suppose you mean ‘official’ friends?”
“No, I don’t,” he said rather tartly. (That manner never has been lost on him.) “I mean, why can’t we be really friends and call ‘Pax’—for at least the time that you’re here? Don’t you see how much better it would make it if we could face these awkwardnesses together, instead of my knowing every time that you are only waiting for the chance to rub it in and to get at me?”
This was all so foreign to his Near Oriental vocabulary that I nearly laughed. But not quite. For it was being borne in upon me still more clearly that I didn’t care for this suggestion of his at all. He was actually asking for my help and co-operation, not in a sham rôle, but a real one? Well, I thought, what cheek!
“If you mean,” I said, “that you want me to promise not to ‘rag’—not to—to banter you again about all this; not to go on saying things that mean one thing for you and another to whoever else hears them, and all that——”
I was going to say that this I might promise; although I felt he was asking for a good deal—for his official fiancée’s one safety-valve, in fact!
“No, no! That’s not what I mean,” he put in. “When I say ‘friends,’ I mean it. Genuine friends. On the terms we might be on if we weren’t en—if we hadn’t this ‘engagement’ between us.”
“How can we be that?” said I emphatically.
“Why can’t we?” he persisted.
“Why? Because I—I don’t see how I could be expected to answer such a question!”