'Yes; what do I know very well?' she answered, taking up the ravelled thread with an impatient weariness.
She felt that this long serio-comic wooing must end once for all. Then, as she noticed the agitated, breathless way in which Ritchie looked at her, an acute apprehension of all that this long courtship meant to him suddenly smote her, and therewith a pang of remorse as she realized how far she had somehow travelled from the old tolerant half-responsive standpoint, when she had decided that if she married anyone without being in love it must be Ted.
He looked at her for some minutes without speaking, and Stella knew it was because he feared to put the old question into words. She was always ready to see how faulty she was—ready to blame herself where blame was due. She was all the more conscious of any blame that might attach to her in this long intermittent wooing, because by some process which she herself could not have explained, the moment they met it became clearer to her that those fugitive resolves that she harboured from time to time after they last parted, of accepting Ritchie as her lover—her future husband—were, in truth, impossible—or, at least, possible only at some indefinite period—not now.
'Ted, I am very sorry,' she said humbly, after a pause.
'Sorry!' he echoed. 'Why are you sorry? I don't expect you to love me as I love you. It's not the way of girls—like you.' Ted would sometimes make running comments on herself and things in general that amused Stella. Speculations, theories and musings on things in general were quite foreign to his nature, while they were part of her daily atmosphere. And yet she was vaguely conscious that, one-sided as his point of view might be, it rested on contact with more sides of life than were open to her ken. 'If you'll—you'll only just put up with me at first, Stella, I'm willing to run the risk.'
'Oh, it isn't your risk I think of so much,' she answered, looking up into his face smilingly.
He was standing nearer to her again, leaning on the mantelpiece, pulling a large red rose asunder and letting the petals fall on her one by one.
'By the way, I heard Konrad jarred his knee—how is he?' she said, with rather a barefaced attempt at getting away from the subject.
'All right again. But I haven't been thinking much of horses lately. I've had other fish to fry.'
'What fish, Ted?'