She could see him trembling.
“Not that, old thing,” he interrupted. “Not pity. That would make me really ill. Love’s just a thing that happens along, but one starter doesn’t make a race.” He held out his hand. “Well, doctor’s orders to go to bed early. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Dubby,” she said, and added hesitatingly: “You’ll come on Sunday?”
“Lord, yes,” he said. “I don’t love and run away. Good-night.”
She sat for a long while staring into vacancy, then found that something wet was dropping on her hands. She bathed her eyes and took the novel up again. A proposal occupied, she found, twelve pages of turgid, emotional dialogue; but, of course, her experience might be limited. Certainly it did not confirm the book’s verbosity.
She was quite sure that she did not want Dubby Stewart. He did not strike her as humorous at all.
CHAPTER XIX—EFFIE IN LOVE
SEVERAL causes combined to make her think of Sam, too, as not at all humorous when she saw him in the morning. Unlike him, she was not at her best in the early hours of the day, and the strain of arriving at an office by nine a.m. was one from which she did not recover for some time. She hated business, but without that cross of early rising she might have found it almost tolerable.