Slowly he sank down into his chair again, and sat facing her across the empty rum glasses. At first he seemed too dumbfounded for words, but presently muttered: “Why didn’t you tell me right off, Lili?” And then, as she merely continued to sob, he went on more forcefully: “Cheer up. It’s not too late, at that, is it? Nobody’s going to stop to figure up the time.” His conviction was considerable, though it did not rest upon experience.
“All I wish is I could just die and be out of the way!” she moaned.
Her eyes were very red, her hair was ruffled and hot-looking. It occurred to Jerome, almost critically, that she might have chosen a less frequented place than the lounge of the hotel for her upsetting confidence, although the room was, it is quite true, deserted and silent. Then it came to him that she had really set out just to be jolly with him in an effort to forget her troubles, and that suddenly her courage had failed.
“Don’t talk like that, Lili,” he begged, knocking the ash carefully off his cigarette. “It’s nothing anybody can help now, and I’m ready to marry you right off, whenever you say. Come on. Let’s go out now and see if we can’t manage to scare up a license and a parson. There must be a way here as well as in civilized places.”
“It won’t do any good,” she said wretchedly, elbows on the edge of the table, her chin in her hands, and her head shaking a slow, mournful negation.
“Come on, buck up, Lili! I hate to see you like this.”
She gazed across at him with rueful eyes, in which there was no beam at all now. Lili’s eyes never seemed to look quite natural unless they were beaming.
“I got along just fine until I met you,” she lamented, almost with an air of reproach, though no one could honestly reproach Jerome very heavily with having lured astray a girl of Lili’s qualities, experience, and temperament. As a matter of fact, her conscience troubled her a little about that wretched soldier....
“I feel just as bad over it as you do,” Jerome assured her. “But I can’t see the good of sitting here crying.”
“You can’t understand how a woman feels, Jerry.”