"I always thought you would fall in love with Estelle, some day,"
Adelaide was saying.
Dory looked at Simeon with an ironical smile. "Why does she say those things to me?" he asked. Simeon looked at Adelaide with a puzzled frown that said, "Why, indeed?"
"You and Estelle are exactly suited to each other," explained she.
"Exactly unsuited," replied he. "I have nothing that she needs; she has nothing that I need. And love is an exchange of needs. Now, I have hurt your vanity."
"Why do you say that?" demanded Adelaide.
"You'd like to feel that your lover came to you empty-handed, asking everything, humbly protesting that he had nothing to give. And you know that I—" He smiled soberly. "Sometimes I think you have really nothing I need or want, that I care for you because you so much need what I can give. You poor pauper, with the delusion that you are rich!"
"You are frank," said she, smiling, but not liking it.
"And why shouldn't I be? I've given up hope of your ever seeing the situation as it is. I've nothing to lose with you. Besides, I shouldn't want you on any false terms. One has only to glance about him to shrink from the horrors of marriage based on delusions and lies. So, I can afford to be frank."
She gave him a puzzled look. She had known him all her life; they had played together almost every day until she was seventeen and went East, to school, with Janet Whitney. It was while she was at home on her first long vacation that she had flirted with him, had trapped him into an avowal of love; and then, having made sure of the truth which her vanity of conquest and the fascination of his free and frank manliness for her, though she denied it to herself, had led her on to discover beyond doubt, she became conscience-stricken. And she confessed to him that she loved Ross Whitney and was engaged to him; and he had taken the disclosure so calmly that she almost thought he, like herself, had been simply flirting. And yet—She dimly understood his creed of making the best of the inevitable, and of the ridiculousness of taking oneself too seriously. "He probably has his own peculiar way of caring for a woman," she was now reflecting, "just as he has his own peculiar way in every other respect."
Arthur came, and their mother; and not until long after supper, when her father had been got to bed, did she have the chance to continue the conversation. As soon as she appeared on the veranda, where Dory and Arthur were smoking, Arthur sauntered away. She was alone with Dory; but she felt that she had nothing to say to him. The surge of fury against Ross and Theresa had subsided; also, now that she had seen Theodore Hargrave again, she realized that he was not the sort of man one tries to use for the purpose she had on impulse formed, nor she the sort of woman who, in the deliberateness of the second thought, carries into effect an impulse to such a purpose.