She took this in and turned it about before she answered.
“By which you mean,” she said, “that whatever our relationship might have ripened into, I nipped it off—like a frost.”
“Yes,” said he. “A latish frost.”
She got up and moved about the room, patting a cushion here and setting a chair straight there. Peter did not move; he did not even turn his head; but he was quite aware of her pondering restlessness. He was aware, too, that so long as he held his tongue he had the whip-hand. The evidence for that was soon apparent.
“I didn’t know that my engagement would have that effect,” she said. “I think it is unreasonable that it should have that effect. If you had been in love with me it would have been different; in that case I could have understood it. But, as it was, why should it have made any change in our friendship?”
“What’s the use of asking me?” said Peter, with a sudden touch of irritation. “I can’t tell you why. I don’t know the ‘why’ of anything under the sun. But put it the other way about. Suppose that it had been I who had got engaged to some girl, wouldn’t that have made any change in your sense of our friendship?”
Peter had spread himself a little over the window-seat when she got up. Now when she came back to her old seat she pushed his encroaching knee aside.
“That’s not the same thing,” she said. “A girl can’t be a very intimate friend of a married man in the same way that a man can be a very intimate friend of a married woman.”
“I won’t ask why,” said Peter gently, “because I’m aware that you don’t know.”
“What I say is perfectly true, though.”