“I didn’t hear what he said,” answered Mrs. Sandworth; “I was looking at him.”
“Well?” urged her brother.
“He is a good man,” she said.
A sense that she was holding something in reserve kept him silent, gazing expectantly at her.
“How awfully he’s in love with her!” she brought out finally. “That’s the whole point. He’s in love with her! All this talk about ‘ways of living’ and theories and things that they make so much of—it just amounts to nothing but that he’s in love with her.”
“Oh, you sentimental idiot!” cried the doctor. “I hoped to get some sense out of you.”
“That’s sense,” said Mrs. Sandworth.
“It hasn’t anything to do with the point! Why, as for that, Paul was in love with—”
“He was not!” cried Mrs. Sandworth, with a sudden loud certainty.
The doctor caught her meaning and considered it frowningly. When he spoke, it was to burst out pathetically: “I have loved her all her life.”