"Because you are much more than my best friend, and I am obliged to give up, at last, that idea of you. You have forced me to see that it is not to be realized. And I won't sit about your house, to have people pointing at me, and saying to each other, 'That's the one who is so frightfully in love with her.' It may sound priggish, but I don't choose to be quite so unmanly as that. Nor would you much respect me if I did so choose."
"But I never did respect you," said Nadine quickly. "I never thought of you as respectable or otherwise. It doesn't come in. You may steal and cheat at cards, and I shall not care. I like whom I like: I like you tremendously. What do you mean you are going to do? Go to Burmah or Bengal? I don't want to lose you, Hughie. It is unkind of you. Besides, we shall not marry for a long time yet, and even then— Ah, it is the old tale, the old horror called Me all over again—I don't love anybody. Many are delightful and I am so fond of them. But the other, the absorption, the gorgeous foolishness of it all, it is away outside of me, a fairy-tale and I am grown up now and say, 'For me it is not true.'"
Hugh came a step nearer her.
"You poor devil," he said gently.
Tears, as yet unshed, gathered in Nadine's eyes. They were fairly creditable tears: they were not at any rate like the weepings of the great prig-prince and compounded merely of "languor and self-pity," but sorrow for Hugh was one ingredient in them. Yet in the main they were for herself, since the only solvent for egoism is love.
"Yes, I am that," she said. "I'm a poor devil. I'm lost, as I said to that foolish Arbuthnot woman with her feet and great violin. Hark, she is playing it again: she is a big 'C major'! She has been scolding me, though if it comes to that I gave it her back with far more gamin in my tongue. And now you say you will not be friends any longer, and Mama does not like my marrying Seymour, though she does not argue, and there is no one left but myself, and I hate myself. Oh, I am lost, and I wave my flags and there is no one who sees or understands. I shall go back to Daddy, I think, and he and I will drink ourselves drunk, and I shall have the red nose. But you are the worst of them all, Hugh! It is a very strange sort of love you have for me, if all it can do is to desert me. And yet the other day I felt as you feel; I felt it would only be fair to you to see you less. I am a damned weathercock. I go this way and that, but the wind is always cold. I am sorry for you, I want you to be happy, I would make you happy myself, if I could."
Nadine's eyes had quite overflowed, and as she poured out this remarkable series of lamentations, she dabbed at her moistened cheeks. Yet Hugh, though he was so largely to blame, as it seemed, for this emotion, and though all the most natural instincts in him longed to yield, knew that deep in him his determination was absolutely unsoftened. It, and his love for Nadine were of the quality of nether mill-stones. But all the rest of him longed to comfort her.
"Oh, Nadine, don't cry," he said. "I'm not worth crying about, to begin with."
"It is not you alone I cry about," said Nadine with justice. "I cry a little for you, every third drop is for you. The rest is quite for myself."
"It is never worth while to cry for oneself," he said.