And the worst of it was that he could not see just how to right himself; could not blame Jane any more than Irene or himself. Loyalty was a thing to live, not to talk about. After his statements to Jane, both direct and through her father, he looked, in the light of cousinly disclosures, an arrant philanderer—the sort of man who was willing, in Montana sport parlance, “to play both ends against the middle.”
The tongue of the bobbed-haired youngling had run according to form. Her belief in her own desirability had put him at a serious disadvantage. He could not follow the cousins, demand a hearing and assert unmanfully that he didn’t love the one who said he did, but did love her who now believed that he did not.
Just as a peach was as much the down on its cheek as the pit, the response he craved from Jane must have a delicate, adhering confidence over its heart and soul. If she did not know the one-woman-ness of his feeling for her, then the time had not come to tell her. He wouldn’t have wished to talk her into caring for him, even were he given to verbal suasion. Trust was not a thing to be added afterward. It must be component, delicate, adhering—part of the peach. She did—she must already trust him. But she must have her own time for realization.
As for Irene, he’d have to boomerang the extravagant utterances and acts of that perquisitory young admirer back to their source as little like a cad as possible. He felt sure she would not have seized on him had she known the havoc she wrought. She must not be unduly humiliated.
If only folks were wholly good or wholly bad, therefore deserving of absolute punishment or absolute reward as in the movies, life and its living would be less of a strain. So philosophized Peter Pape. If, for instance, Jane were a perfect heroine, she would have loved and trusted him at first sight, as he had her. If he were a reel hero, either caveman or domesticated, he’d have conquered her by brawn or brain long ere this pitiable pass. Mills Harford, as rival, would have been ulteriorly and interiorly bad, rather than a likeable, fine chap much more worthy the girl, no doubt, than himself. Judge Allen, as builder of barriers between them, should be a long-nosed, hard-voiced, scintillating personage, instead of the rosy, round, restrained little man he was. And “the young lady of to-day”—There would be needed a long explanatory sub-title between a close-up of that guilelessly guilty, tender torment and one of her prototype, the histrionic, hectic vamp of yesteryear.
Still stationed on the curb, Pape gained strength from these theories to advance into consideration of his most effective and immediate course toward the end of his present adventure. He had decided that he must continue his attempt to serve in the disintegrated triumvirate, that he must again force his presence upon Jane if she did not send for him soon, that he must fail absolutely to recognize the insidious claims of Irene, when he became conscious of the purring approach of a sport car. On hearing himself hailed by name, he looked up and saw that the man behind the wheel was Mills Harford.
“Have they come or gone?” the real-estater asked.
“Both.” Pape’s mind still was somewhat afield.
“Just my luck to be too late. Mrs. Sturgis might have ’phoned me sooner. Seems to me I should have been sent for first, whatever the scrape. Tell me, she got off all right—Miss Lauderdale?”
“Why not?” Pape nodded, his mental eye upon the good and bad in this rival to whom the baby vamp in the cast had erroneously assigned the successful suitor rôle. “We both are loose,” he added. “She got off scot-free and I, fortunately, was able to pay my fine. Mr. Allen fixed everything. He’s a capable somebody, the judge, a valuable acquaintance for anybody restricted to life in an overgrown town like N’ York. He has a new client if anything else happens to me.”