"Yes," she retorted, "but not when I've told every one that you were taking me. I have a little pride."
He shut his paper and got up. He never could bear scenes.
"Just as you like," he said, trying to speak evenly. "It's your concern. I was only thinking of your comfort. Whatever you do won't hurt me."
A man can escape everything except himself; and so it chanced that Hubert Brett felt a brute twice, repented twice, about one causerie.
He felt it most acutely in his little room.
He very nearly went back to her now, a second time, and said so; but then he remembered what a nasty scene it had been, about nothing. Of course in the old anti-marriage days it had been his pet theory that every wedded pair inevitably—by force of Nature, which meant every one to dwell apart—ended in continued rows; but it had seemed so quite impossible with Helena. Perhaps it always did!...
So sweet and pliable and ignorant of life she had been—yes, this was a new Helena and more like the old Ruth!
No, he would not go back.
He would be hanged if he encouraged her.