“Not you, Jill. Never you, but Theo. He’s your demon.”
“Not much demon about him when he hung from the left foot on to the right at his front door last night, and I sat demurely on my trunk outside.... If the Bacteriological Society could have seen me—I’m lecturing there next week! I’m what Theo had been waiting and longing for since three and a half years, and coming just then—for once even he wasn’t able to carry it off. Zoe would have chucked the incubus through a door, or into a cupboard, or under the bed, and turned up smiling—Theo just stood staring at me with the tears streaming down his face.... My beloved little cad!... So I went home again, and returned this morning—Antonia, you’re not to look like that!” in a spasm of fury. “Didn’t I know he’d get rid of her not ten minutes after I left....”
“Oh, I suppose he said he had,” scornfully.
Gillian raged more. “You’d have sheered off and never looked at him again. ‘For better, for worse’ ... Without the marriage service read over me, I can keep to it as well as any of you. It’s Theo as he is—not Theo transformed by Maskelyne and Devant into a young bride’s dream. We shall live together quite openly; of course, without any blaze of trumpets—but concealment means a flurry again, and a furtive askew-over-your-shoulder look that I don’t approve of. Thank goodness, my private life, as I choose to hack it out, can’t interfere with my especial career. If I’d been a doctor, as I intended——”
“Then you would have had to give up Theo.”
“I’ve just spent twenty minutes patiently explaining—I s’pose you weren’t listening—that if I gave up Theo, he’d take up far too much of my time and thought and vitality and saneness. To live with him is the only way of getting rid of him—mentally.”
“It’s such a twisted, new-fashioned way of arguing.”
“New-fashioned? because I want my man in my home—” for an instant Gillian was wrapped in swift strong beauty.
“And—my child, too?”
“No,” softly. “Not that. One is just decent enough, I hope, to consider the possible preference of the child to remain unborn—Hullo, Theo!” as that gentleman stood on the threshold of a room demoralized by Gillian’s advent to an imitation of a charity bazaar after three days’ vending.