"I know you conceal it, dear. You're brave and self-reliant. But— Isn't there anything I could do to bring you and Dick together again? You're a woman, dear. You simply have to be taken care of, and——"
"Don't shadow your romance with worry about me," said Courtney nervously. She was all confusion and restlessness.
"But I can't help it," pleaded Helen. "I know Richard was neglectful. And he's not an attractive man to a woman, as Basil is—isn't livable and lovable like Basil——"
Helen went on and on contrasting the two men, to Richard's disadvantage at every point. In former days she had been too much "afraid Richard'll find out how foolish I am and how little I know" to get in the least acquainted with him; since the divorce they had talked only constrained commonplaces, when she took Winchie to him. Thus, the comparison was grotesque distortion of Richard. But Courtney was not tempted to try to set her right. Helen, of small mentality and in love with Basil, would not appreciate, would not be convinced, would simply be irritated—would probably misunderstand and be encouraged to pursue her absurd scheme for bringing them together. But parallel with Helen's talk there was in Courtney's mind a juster contrasting of the two men—the one strong, the other weak; the one real, the other idealist; the one simple, the other a poseur; the one intelligent, the other merely conceited; the one master of his emotions, the other their slave; the one an original, the other a pattern, an identical sample of thousands turned out by the "best families" and the "best colleges" and the "best society." And then it came to her why she had estimated Basil quickly and accurately, once she began it—that it was because in Richard she for the first time had a measure to do her measuring with. The mists of his abstraction had completely hid his personality from her, as from everybody. Those mists had blown away in the cyclone of the disruption of their marriage, and he had stood revealed—and Basil also—Basil, the dwarf beside the giant. She could see how the lesser man had made what was, in the circumstances, irresistible appeal to the imperious craving that must be satisfied before the need of heart for sympathy and of mind for comradeship could gain a hearing, the craving that in gaining its ends will compel the imagination to play any necessary sorry trick upon the intelligence. She could see this; and she could also see how sorry the trick upon intelligence had been—how absurd was her dream of founding a life-long content and happiness upon what Basil could give her and she Basil.
"I'm sure," Helen was saying, "with a little management you could get Richard back."
These words fell upon Courtney's ears just as into her mind again came that scene between her and Richard at the laboratory—the childish, the coarse taunts she had hurled at him, and how he had met them. She was hot with the shame of it when Helen spoke. The suggestion that Richard could be got back overwhelmed her with a crushing, stinging sense of how in contempt he must hold her now. The red of her skin flamed up into scarlet. "Don't speak of those things," she commanded harshly. Then, instantly ashamed of this misdirected outburst of temper, she put on her most careless, frivolous air—put it on well enough to deceive Helen. "Let's talk trousseau," said she. "You haven't much time, you know. June's very near."
But Helen was too curious about the trouble that had so abruptly changed a friendship into hatred. "It must have been exciting—that quarrel between them," she hinted encouragingly. "You were there, weren't you?"
"Yes."
"Tell me, Courtney."
"It cured my cold," said Courtney. "I'd been feeling queer in the nose and eyes——"