“Get through with your squabbling, little boys,” she said, gaily, with a saucy smile at Hendricks and a swift, perfunctory kiss on Embury’s cheek, and then she went away with Mason Elliott.
They walked a few blocks in silence, and then Elliott said, abruptly: “What were you and Sanford quarreling about?”
“Aren’t you a little intrusive?” but a smile accompanied the words.
“No, Eunice; it isn’t intrusion. I have the right of an old friend—more than a friend, from my point of view—and I ask only from the best and kindest motives.”
“Could you explain some those motives?” She tried to make her voice cold and distant, but only succeeded in making it pathetic.
“I could—but I think it better, wiser and more honorable not to. You know, dear, why I want to know. Because I want you to be the happiest woman in the whole world—and if Sanford Embury can’t make you so—”
“Nobody can!” she interrupted him, quickly. “Don’t, Mason,” she turned a pleading look toward him; “don’t say anything we may both regret. You know how good Sanford is to me; you know how happy we are together.”
“Were,” he corrected, very gravely.
“Were—and are,” she insisted. “And you know, too—no one better—what a fiendish temper I have! Though I try my best to control it, it breaks out now and then, and I am helpless. Sanford thinks he can tame it by giving me as good as I send—by playing, as he calls it, Petruchio to my Katherine—but, somehow, I don’t believe that’s the treatment I need.”
Her dark eyes were wistful, but she did not look at him.