"I tell you, Simmy, I cannot marry Anne. I love her,—God knows how terribly I want her,—in spite of everything. It is nature. You can't kill love, no matter how hard you try. Some one else has to do the killing. Anne is keeping it alive in me. She has tortured my love, beaten it, outraged it, but all the time she has been secretly feeding it, caressing it, never for an instant letting it out of her grasp. You cannot understand, Simmy. You've never been in love with a woman like Anne. She may have despaired at times, but she has never given up the fight, not even when she must have thought that I despised her. She knew that my love was mortally hurt, but do you think she would let it die? No! She will keep it alive forever,—and she will suffer, too, in doing so. But what's that to Anne? She—"
"Just a second, old chap," broke in Simmy. "You are forgetting that Anne wants you to be happy."
"God, how happy I could have been with her!"
"See here, will you go down there and see her?" demanded Simmy.
"I can't do that,—I can't do it. Simmy—" he lowered his voice to almost a whisper,—"I can't trust myself. I don't know what would happen if I were to see her again,—be near her, alone with her. This longing for her has become almost unbearable. I thought of her every minute of the time I was out there at the front—Yes, I had to put the heaviest restraint upon myself at times to keep from chucking the whole thing and dashing back here to get her, to take her, to keep her,—maybe to kill her, I don't know. Now I realise that I was wrong in coming back to America at all. I should have gone—oh, anywhere else in the world. But here I am, and, strangely enough, I feel stronger, more able to resist. It was the distance between us that made it so terrible. I can resist her here, but, by heaven, I couldn't over there. I could have come all the way back from France to see her, but I can't go from here down to Washington Square,—so that shows you how I stand in the matter."
"Now I know the real reason why you came back to little old New York," said Simmy sagely, and Thorpe was not offended.
"In the first place I cannot marry her while she still has in her possession the money for which she sold herself and me," said Thorpe, musing aloud. "You ought to at least be able to understand that, Simmy? No matter how much I love her, I can't make her my wife with that accursed money standing—But there's no use talking about that. There is an even graver reason why I ought not to marry her, an insurmountable reason. I cannot tell you what it is, but I fear that down in your heart you suspect."
Simmy leaned forward in his chair. "I think I know, old man," he said simply. "But even that shouldn't stand in the way. I don't see why you should have been kind and gentle and merciful to Mr. Thorpe, and refuse to be the same, in a different way, to her." His face broke into a whimsical smile. "Anne is what you might call hopelessly afflicted. Dammit all, put her out of her misery!"
Thorpe stared at him aghast. The utter banality of the remark left him speechless. For the first time in their acquaintance, he misjudged Simmy Dodge. He drew back from him, scowling.
"That's a pretty rotten thing to say, Simmy," he said, after a moment. "Pretty poor sort of wit."