Now, had there been time for Pape to foreplan his curtain speech he might have continued to be artistic. But Jane’s applause seemed to go to his head. He honestly had meant to continue histrionically suppressed, unasking, admirable. Yet he didn’t; just couldn’t. He stretched his arm along the back of the bench until his finger-tips touched the tweed of her sleeve. Perhaps the contact was unnerving. Perhaps her eyes were too earnest. Perhaps her faint, wistful smile was falsely promising. At any rate, he proceeded to do what he had determined not to do.
“It was quite a stunt. I admit it,” he said. “Don’t you think you sort of ought to—That is, don’t you want to reward me?”
“Reward you?”
She drew away from him and his suggestion.
“Of course I don’t mean just that.” Pape’s eyes were on her lips. “You paid me beforehand. What I wish you’d do is to get me in your debt again. The credit system is the one for me. I can do anything to make good when I’m deep in debt. Will you—won’t you——”
“Odious!”
A second or so he blinked into the blast of her interruption. By its flare he saw her interpretation of his bad beginning. He tried an extinguisher.
“Wait a minute. Don’t flay me before you understand. I’m not such a jasper as to mean to exact—What I wish you’d do—What I want to ask—Jane, have a little mercy on me. Tell me who and what to you is that man living in your flat.”
From the look of her, judging dispassionately as possible, all was over between them. She got to her feet, as he to his. She looked strengthened by righteous rage, he weakened by unrighteous humility. She made the only utterances—and they did not help much, being rather fragmentary.
“You think that I—You have assumed that he—You believe that we—So that is why——”