“You are the most frightfully cold-blooded person I’ve ever met,” she told him. “If you had ever been in love yourself you wouldn’t talk so calmly about separating these two. What if Lucille is blind? There have been blind wives, and blind husbands, for that matter, since the beginning of time. You’re hard-hearted.”
“No,” said David; “I am only trying to be the right kind of a brother—as I have tried to be ever since that black day years ago when old Doctor Brown told us that the little sister would never see again. And your argument falls down at the other end, too. You say, if I had ever been in love myself.... That has already happened to me, Virginia.”
Her laugh was deliciously care free. “And you have never told me!” she mocked. “Does she live in Middleboro?—or maybe it’s Florida. Or have you broken all the traditions by keeping faith with a college widow?”
“No, she doesn’t live in Middleboro or in Florida, and I am very certain she has never been a college widow. It’s only a pipe-dream for me as yet, but some day——”
“Some day she will grow tired of waiting and marry somebody else,” was the brisk retort. “Is she pretty?”
“No; that isn’t the word at all.”
“Beautiful, then?”
“So beautiful that I can’t be with her without going fairly dotty.”
Again she laughed derisively.
“You seem to have all the symptoms, and really I didn’t believe it of you, David. You have always seemed so solid and sensible.”