“I think you could make any woman happy, in a way, if you tried. But that isn’t the question. No doubt there are many marriages made without love, of the kind we are talking about, on either side; and they are happy, after a fashion. But where there is love on one side and only consent on the other ... I can’t conceive of anything more dreadful for the loving one.”
“Perhaps you are right. Just the same, I don’t see where you get all this wisdom of the ages, Jean. I’ve often wondered if there were ever a wall of sophistry built so thick that you couldn’t see through it at a glance.”
“I have lived a long time in the past year, Harry; you know that,” she answered, with a little catch in her voice; and then she began to talk about the play they had just sat through, and there were no more confidences.
Dutifully obeying the command concealed under the conventional protest and query, Bromley made a telephone appointment with Eugenia, and at the proper calling hour the following afternoon presented himself at the furnished house in Champa Street taken for the season by the Follansbees. It was the statuesque beauty herself who admitted him and led the way to the darkened drawing-room, and her first question, when they were alone together, was disconcertingly direct.
“This Miss Dabney I met last night, Harry: is she the daughter of the widow you are boarding with in West Denver?”
“One of three daughters; the others are schoolgirls. Jean is the man of the family; she is a hat-trimmer in Madame Marchande’s.” It took a good deal to shake the play-boy’s easy confidence in himself, but he had a feeling that if he gave the grim demon of consternation the merest shadow of an opening, he would be lost.
“She is a very pretty girl; much too pretty to be wearing out her life in a millinery shop, don’t you think?”
“I do,” he asserted frankly. “But there seems to be no present help for it.”
“Isn’t there? When I saw her with you last night, I was—I was——”
Coming in out of the bright sunlight, Bromley had been half blind in the cool, darkened room. But now that his eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom he saw that his lovely questioner had stopped in curious embarrassment. Her eyes were downcast and she was folding and refolding the filmy handkerchief in her lap. Suddenly she left her chair and came to sit beside him on the old-fashioned, rep-covered sofa.