His very directness irritated her. “I’m certainly tired of the way we just drag along.”
“Well,” he said at last, speaking with an emotion which, while genuine enough, also seemed to him rather pleasurably smacking of the heroic, “if you can do better without me, all I can say is you better try. Nothing I do seems to suit you.” And, in his aroused mood of masculine ire, Jerome found it expedient to add: “It’s my private opinion you don’t exactly know what you do want.”
The thrust was so palpably true, in a sense, that the girl abandoned her last scruple of lingering reserve. “I guess it’s high time we broke off our engagement!”
Her car arrived and she stepped aboard, while Jerome turned and marched off without a word.
CHAPTER TWO
THE AMAZING CUSTOMER
I
Alone in the street car, Stella brooded it all miserably. “How unhappy I am,” she thought. And then she faltered: “I didn’t realize....” Yet she asked herself, too, what could be left unsaid if the scene were to be played over—“except, maybe, the actual breaking off...?” Everything she had said was quite true, yet her heart was not at rest. “I don’t seem to know which way to turn any more,” she told herself darkly, almost in tears.
Meanwhile Jerome, continuing home on foot, argued that what had occurred was no great matter. She had succeeded really in arousing him, and his mood was surprisingly energetic.