"Yes. On a submarine chaser. Got pneumonia from exposure and was invalided home just before the Armistice."
"And you came back here?"
"I came here," he corrected me. "I enlisted from Maine. I was discharged in New York. That was when I couldn't find anything I could do, until this skating trick came along."
I sat thinking for a time; as long thoughts as I could command. The obvious course was to send for Phillida's father. Yet what could that vague and learned gentleman do that I could not? I visioned the Professor standing in this riotous, gaudy restaurant, swinging his eye-glasses by their silk ribbon and peering at Vere in helpless distaste and consternation. It was practically certain that Phil would refuse to go home with him.
What if she did go home? I could picture the scene there, when the truth came out. The mortification of her people, the gossip in the little town, her outcast position among the girls and boys with whom she had grown up—what a martyrdom for a sensitive spirit! Of course, the only possible thing considered by Aunt Caroline would be a prompt divorce.
If Phillida refused to consent to a divorce, how could she live at home as the wife of a man her parents had pronounced unfit to receive? If she yielded and gave up Vere, would she be much better off? An embarrassment to her family, the heroine of a stolen marriage and Reno freedom, what chance of happiness would she have in her conventional circle? Especially as she neither was a beauty nor the dashing type of girl who might make capital of such a reputation. Probably she would bury herself in nunlike seclusion, stay in her room when callers came, and wear a veil when she went out to walk.
Meanwhile, she would break her heart for Vere.
Could matters be any worse if she tried life with him, even if the experiment eventually proved a failure and ended in a divorce instead of beginning there? Might not her parents be spared much they most dreaded, if their friends could be told simply that Phillida had made a love match and was with her husband?
Finally, Phillida was a human creature with the right to manage her own life. Had any of us the right to lay hands upon her existence and mould it to our fancy?
I looked up from my revery to find the eyes of both of them fixed on me as if I held their doom balanced upon my palm. Perhaps, in a sense, I did.