“I’ve not.” Effie was indignant. She had not starved herself. While all was dreary, food had certainly not attracted her, but neither had anything else; and she expected to take a lively interest in it now. “Really I’ve not.”
“What you say goes,” he said. “And Florrie imagined it, but she didn’t imagine the part about your not going to the office, and if anything’s wrong there, don’t forget that I know Branstone pretty well. I can talk to him like a father.”
“There’s nothing wrong, anywhere,” she said, and, indeed, things were not only not wrong but exuberantly right, only she could not tell him why.
“You’re sure of that?” he persisted. “There’s nothing you can tell a pal? Nothing you can tell me, when you know I’d walk through fire for you? Damn it, I can’t pretend. I’m not a friend. I’m a man in love, and I ask you to be fair.”
“Dubby,” she pleaded, “don’t make things too hard for me.”
“Is it I who make them hard?” he asked, “oris it Sam?”
She looked at him amazed, and certainly Effie was stupid then, or, at least, too wrapped up in her great preoccupation to be alert. “Oh, don’t be petty,” she said. “I didn’t debit you with jealousy.”
“No? No? And yet I have a certain right to be jealous of him. I think you won’t deny it.”
It wasn’t what he said or even the deep bitterness of his tone, it was something in his eyes, like a hurt animal’s, which made her quite suddenly, and as a thing apart from his words, see what had happened. But she did not see even now the whole of Dubby’s love and the beauty of his knightly move.
“You know!” she said. “Dubby, you knew when you spoke just now. You knew that Sam and I——”