“Your life’s so different,” she weakened to explain.
“My life? Ah! my poor little playmate, and so you consider my life’s a happy one—married to a woman who never loved me from the first.”
“Oh, please!” she protested.
“Whose indifference,” he continued, “has taken the heart out of me at last, whose entire interest lies in her club and her women friends. I did love her; I loved her madly—madly, do you understand?—but, what’s the use? Ah, non, mon Dieu!” he cried. “Real happiness in life lies in a good comrade,” and would have gone on further to explain, but checked himself. “I see,” he said after a moment. “It’s this,” he ventured, sweeping his black eyes dramatically over the ugly little room.
She gave him a startled look in protest.
“I don’t blame you, my dear.”
She feared he would continue. He had guessed the truth, and to her relief ceased speaking, not daring for the moment to touch even as skilfully as he could upon her impossible mother, or her stepfather, whom he could imagine by hearsay but had never seen. Nothing, in fact, escaped him; neither the sordid commonness of the apartment, with its hodgepodge of bad taste, its dingy semblance of comfort, or the mother’s effusive ignorance. He had reached that period in his suit when he felt that he was wasting time, when he longed to take this little rose that had tumbled into all this common débris of the boresome and the ordinary into his arms.
She was again on the verge of confessing to him, innocently enough, at least how much pretty things appealed to her. Deep down in her young heart (though she was too loyal to confess it) she saw clearly her mother’s ignorance and her failings; still deeper down she abhorred Ebner Ford. Even her respect for him had vanished shortly after her mother’s marriage. He had even lied to her about the little money she had earned and had given him. And yet she ended by saying simply:
“Mother is so silly at times.” Even this she softened by the fact that she loved her dearly.
“You seem so out of place in all this,” he declared tensely, and so suddenly that before she knew it he had seized her swiftly in his arms. “Sue—listen to me!”