For the rest, he was Sir Edwin Crathie, Cabinet Minister, and member of a proud, patrician family. She was Hal Pritchard, secretary, typist, and occasional journalist at the office of a leading London paper.
She grew restless, and commenced roaming round the room. Her knowledge of life, as it is lived near its teeming, throbbing, working centre, warned her that the new turn of their friendship held danger. If she was wise, she would shun the danger, and go back to her old life before he had come into it. She would firmly and resolutely refuse to see him again.
To do so without regret was impossible. Now that the friendship seemed about to cease, she realised it had meant more than she knew. She held her face in her hands, and her cheeks tingled at the memory of the last eager kiss.
She was woman enough to know it was good to be kissed like that by a man who, even if his morals and principles left much to be desired, was still very much a man, and had won a distinction that made most women proud of far less attention than he had shown her.
Still?—
In a different sense she was struggling in a net of circumstances something like Lorraine’s. Lorraine wanted to do the right thing, or, at any rate, the sporting thing.
So did Hal.
In a world full of temptations, and backsliding, and much suffering thereby, the sporting thing for the strong woman is to stand to her guns. If Hal dallied with Sir Edwin now, she felt she would be deserting her post. At the judgment-bar of her own heart, which, after all, matters far more than the judgment-bar of public opinion, she would be allowing herself to compromise for the sake of the fleeting, dangerous pleasure.
She stopped short by the window, and stared out into the gloomy, lamplit street. And it crossed her mind to remember the bitter price so many women had paid for that dalliance and compromise, so many now probably gazing out with dull eyes into gloomy streets, hopeless, reckless, and joyless.
Yes; dalliance and compromise were mistakes. The real pluck was the sporting spirit that stood to its guns, even if it cost a big and wearisome effort. She would not dally. She would answer to her own Best, and try to go on her steadfast way.