"Oh, Laura, Laura!" she said softly.
With a cry of remorse Laura threw herself upon her knees beside the window, kissing the gloved hands in Gerty's lap.
But Gerty had wiped her tears away and sat smiling her little worldly smile of knowledge. "I am jealous of you, but not in the way you meant," she answered. "I am jealous for myself, for the one little bit of me that is really alive—the part of myself that is in you. I am afraid to go over again with you the old road that I went over with myself—the old wanting, wanting, wanting that ends in nothing."
"But why should I go over it?" asked Laura, from her knees, and the flush in her face coloured all her manner with a fine deception.
Gerty's mocking gayety rang back into her voice. "You might as well ask me why I am still fool enough to be in love with Perry," she returned with her flippant laugh, "it's a part of what Arnold calls 'the damnable contradiction of life.' You might as well ask Connie Adams why she was born bad?"
"Was she—and how do you know it?" demanded Laura.
"I don't know." Gerty's shrug was exquisitely indifferent. "But it's more charitable, I fancy, to suppose so. Have you seen Roger, by the bye?"
Laura shook her head. "I would rather not. There is nothing one could say."
"Oh, I don't know—one might congratulate him on his liberation, and that's something. I dare say he'll have to get a divorce now, though Perry says he hates them."
"Then I don't believe he'll do it, he doesn't live by the ordinary ethics of the rest of us, you know. Will she marry Brady, do you think?"