The speech seemed to awake an echo in the room. Peter was faintly conscious of just such another scene as this, though when and where she could not remember.
“Need he interfere?” she said at last, haltingly. Then: “I say, we’re not quarrelling, are we?”
Merle smiled: “Yes, I believe we are.” Then her look shadowed once more. “Do you think I’m going through again what I sat through at that horrible supper? The knowledge of being in the way; unwanted; seeing between you two that secret current of understanding, and all the while having to pretend I was unaware of it. The trio is dead—dead—dead. And it’s not I who have killed it. It’s you and Stuart. We found the most wonderful playtime that ever was—but you had to drag in love, like any other two people of opposite sex.”
Peter crossed to the window, her back to the room: “It might equally well have been Stuart and you.”
“For me, the point lies in the fact that it wasn’t.”
“You’d have acted the same. A man and two girls—what else could we expect, admitting him?”
In the dignified street below, a long line of lights sprang into a sudden curve of brilliance athwart the dusk. With one hand, Peter held aside the tapestried hangings ... and the touch brought with it great floods of memory. Echoes?—she had traced back the echoes now. This quarrel had been rehearsed. The Inevitable had recoiled with ironic effect on those who had dared mock it with burlesque.
She wondered at what point Merle would remember the pretence drama they had perpetrated of jealousy and farewell, when the question was first raised of admitting a third to their union. But Merle was blinded by a royal rage, would see nothing clearly till she had delivered herself of the pent-up storm of emotion:
“We were to have been so different; we three. Oh, how could you spoil it? I’ve seen thousands look at each other as you looked at one another last night—but where am I to find the games and the nursery again? Real children can’t play as we did ... and you and Stuart have fallen in love!” Her delicate features quivered with scorn for the two who could not keep it up; who had dropped from the kingdom of magic strange and new, to an old, old kingdom of magic; old as the hills and the seas and the oldest road.
Peter said never a word. She was afraid to speak, for fear of again treading on the heels of that former occasion. It was too absurd that they should thus be repeating themselves, in the very same setting, and neither able to laugh at it.