The pair inspected one another across the mellow firelight. After a long pause, the elder said:
"You're not much of a pal, Mollie. You've only told me half the story."
Mollie Fullerford blushed. Her reticent virginity revolted from the idea of confessing herself, to Betty, in love with James Wilberforce. Yet that she was in love with the man, most uncomfortably in love with him, Mollie knew. Despite all her efforts to maintain the pose of the modern young, the pose of cold-blooded mate-selection, she had failed as lamentably as most others of her kind to control nature. Nature and the modern creed refused to be reconciled. She realized now that she wanted--exclusively--James. She wanted to belong to him; she wanted him to belong to her; she wanted him--and no other--to father her children.
That last thought rekindled Mollie's blushes. Succeed as she might in curbing her tongue, she could not curb her feelings. She fell to wondering if Jimmy would ask her to marry him, to speculating whether, even if their friendship so abruptly broken off should be renewed (as she had subconsciously hoped it would be renewed when she invited herself to London), whether, even if Jimmy did ask her to marry him, she would be capable of sacrificing Aliette. Would she not be forced to make conditions--conditions that no man in Jimmy's position could possibly accept? Would she not be forced to say: "If I marry you, you'll have to let me receive my sister and my sister's lover"?
"How about the Wilberforce man?" Betty's words interrupted reverie. "Does he know you're in town?"
"Yes," admitted Mollie.
"You still write to each other then?"
"Only occasionally."
"My dear, how exciting! When did you hear from him last?"
But at that Aliette's sister broke off the conversation with a wry "Betty, I simply won't be cross-examined."