“Why,” he asked, with a bitter little laugh, “what is there wrong with me?”
“I do not know what there is wrong with you. And I am not interested to inquire. But, so far as I am concerned, there is nothing right.”
A woman's answer after all, and one of those reasons which are no reasons, and yet rule the world.
Roden looked at her, completely puzzled. In a flash of thought he recalled Dorothy's warning, and her incomprehensible foresight.
“Then,” he said, lapsing in his self-forgetfulness into the terse language of his everyday life and thought, “what on earth have you been driving at all along?”
“I have been driving at Herr von Holzen and the Malgamite scheme. I have been helping Tony Cornish,” she answered.
So Percy Roden quitted the house at the corner of Park Straat a wiser man, and perhaps he left a wiser woman in it.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Vansittart to Marguerite Wade, long afterwards, when a sort of friendship had sprung up and ripened between them—“my dear, never let a man ask you to marry him unless you mean to say yes. It will do neither of you any good.”
And Marguerite, who never allowed another the last word, gave a shrewd little nod before she answered—“I always say no—before they ask me.”