"Because I don't care to stay up here and...." If concluded, the sentence would have run: "and see you together." But he thought better of it. Poise saved him. He compressed his lips.
"Oh, Les, don't make it so hard for me!"
"You didn't spare me!" he replied grimly.
"What do you mean?" Her eyes were a little wide.
"H'm...."
"Tell me, Les. We can't go on this way." She meant that she would find it uncomfortable—a cloud for her present satisfaction with life.
"You knew how I felt. You knew all about it. Yet you didn't send me packing, or try to drop me. You didn't even give me a hint of how things were. Do you call that sparing a fellow?"
His arraignment was almost bewildering in its complexity. But she chose one indictment and grappled with it valiantly. "Of course I didn't try to drop you. I never treated any man that way!"
"Well," he replied dryly, "I wish you had."
"You wish I hadn't had anything to do with you?" Such a proposition struck her as unpleasant, to a marked degree—even almost grotesque.