But she did not take it. Instead she twisted her handkerchief nervously around her fingers. Stacey had never seen any one with so little repose.
“Do you think,” she demanded abruptly, “that it’s all right for me to marry him?”
He stared at her. “Why, what do you mean?” he asked, completely lost.
“Well, I mean,” she said sullenly, her lower lip quivering like that of a child about to cry, “I mean—after what I said to you.”
Stacey understood now and was touched. “Why, you silly child!” he exclaimed, “I never heard of anything so absurd! If that’s the worst thing you ever did you’ve the purest past in the world!”
She brightened, tears of relief standing in her eyes. “But anyway I must tell Paul about it, mustn’t I?”
“No!” Stacey almost shouted, overcome with a mixture of amazement and admiration. “There’s nothing to tell!”
Irene wiped her eyes, in obvious resentment at the need. “All right, then,” she said. “Thanks.” And now she shook hands. Then she looked at Stacey with a tremulous smile. “You’ve got a lot of charm,” she announced.
But at this he retreated hastily behind his desk, and she departed, laughing.
Stacey thought often of Marian, but he did not see her until July. He had left the office late one afternoon and was walking briskly along the boulevard on the way to the tennis courts when she called to him from her open car. It drew up at the curb beside him, and Marian reached out her hand to him gracefully. She was coming from a tea, she said, and she was wearing a lacy dress of blue and silver and a drooping picture-hat, white and transparent, that cast soft shadow over her face without really obscuring it. Against the deep cushions of the tonneau she looked small, elegant and sophisticated. It occurred to Stacey that it was nonsense for him to be concerned about her. Their meeting must have appeared to an outsider like one of those Salon pictures of an encounter in the Bois de Boulogne.