"He can do more good as he is. There are plenty of men who can fight, but there are very few who have Vincent’s wonderful eloquence."
"He said he was crazy to go," said Angelica; "but I notice he doesn’t."
"He’s married, too, you must remember," said Polly. "That makes a difference. Married men aren’t supposed to go till the very last."
Their eyes met.
"Take him!" said Angelica’s glance. "I don’t care!" But after Polly had gone, she took out Vincent’s letter and read it again. She couldn’t understand it! She felt bruised, and weary, and sick at heart, and baffled. A letter like that, entreating her to come back to him, and, when she came, to find him on the best of terms with his wife and quite indifferent to her!
"But perhaps later, when we’re alone," she thought, "he’ll say something."
But all that day, and that evening, not a word, and the next day, too, until it grew plain to her that he didn’t intend to see her alone, that he was avoiding her.
So the next morning she wrote a note and slipped it under his door:
I want to see you.
He made no sort of answer; he went on all day as if she didn’t exist; he wouldn’t even meet her eye. When he wasn’t going out in the motor to make speeches for the Friends of France, he was sitting in Polly’s room, telling her what he had said at the last meeting and what he was going to say at the next one.