“What are you doing?” asked Gertrude.
“Making toast for your father’s toast-and-water.”
“So I see. And what was Annette doing?”
“Annette was showing me how to make it.”
Gertrude drew herself up heroically, and with what she took for dramatic intensity she said:
“Bennett, do you love me?”
“No,” said he, startled into truth.
Gertrude sat down with emphatic suddenness. His answer had crumpled her up, but also it acted boomerang-fashion, flew back and knocked the wind out of Bennett. (In a world of liars truth always acts like that.) He was the first to recover and he approached Gertrude with contrition.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t feel myself to-night. Queer things going on inside me and outside. It isn’t quite true what I said just now. I do love you. I do, really. But love isn’t what I thought it was. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t what I thought it was.”