“You?”
“How about hurting me?” she asked. “You’ve made a weird sort of love to me. You’ve balanced on the fence and told me you might fall in love with me. You’ve carried on a sort of rubber-elastic courtship—ready to snap back out of reach if I seemed likely to catch you.... Have you thought about me at all? Really, I’ve some right to be considered.”
She was right. Undoubtedly he had not been fair to her. He had thought only of himself and of his sentiments toward her, but scarcely at all of her sentiments toward him.
“Why,” he said, “I don’t believe I’ve thought of that side of it. It never occurred to me that you—that you might be in love with me.”
“Well, I’m not.” She spoke sharply.
“Do you mean you never could be?”
“There! Of all things!... You want me to tell you that if you make up your mind to condescend to love me I’ll be ready to drop into your hands. You want to have your cake and eat it. I’d say you were the most completely selfish person I’ve ever encountered.”
“Really I’m not. It isn’t selfishness.... It’s just that I am so confused by the whole situation that I don’t know what to do.... You don’t know how relieved and happy I would be if there was nobody but you, and we were going to be married. You are just the kind of wife—”
“That your neighbors would approve of,” she interrupted. “I know. What I don’t know is why I keep on talking to you like this. I ought to send you about your business and tell you never to come near me again ... but I’m not going to. You’ve told me in effect that you would be in love with me if it weren’t for somebody else, and that the only reason you are pleased to consider me as a candidate at all is because you are afraid your family and your neighbors would make a fuss if you took the other woman home. That’s the truth, and you know it is.”
“Well,” he said, ruefully, and not wisely, “so long as you don’t love me, what does it matter?”