"With Fanny!... I suppose she didn't consider going with Miss Mary?"
"Couldn't stand the pressure. Why, New York would kill her off like a fly! And besides, she doesn't want to get too far away from the Warders, you know. Of course, Fanny can't make her very comfortable just now—but we talked it all over and that seemed the best arrangement, all round."
"I see."
"Mary can't turn back now, of course. Well, Charlie," said Donald, earnestly, "I don't hold with her fool notions, and all that but hang it all!—she's no ordinary woman, and this is no ordinary job. Those people are giving her two assistants and $5000 a year. What d'you know about that for a poor little girl?"
He was struggling to get into his overcoat without "breaking" his shirt-front—going at once, evidently. But Charles had lost sight of his strategic intentions.
"Well, how about you two old chaps for the furnished apartment—February fifteenth, if you want it?"
Charles observed that he couldn't look at it. Donald, as if only stimulated by his host's taciturnity, became sentimental.
"First Mary, then Mrs. Wing, then me—this is going to be a break-up, Charlie, do you realize it? I'm beginning to feel it, too, let me tell you! Jove," said Donald, putting on his shining head-piece and bringing the conversation back to himself simultaneously—"now that I come right down to it, I don't want to leave this good old town!"
He departed, to his unconscious match-making. Charles, left alone, merely sat on at his table. And all that he thought of Angela Flower now was of an insignificant remark she had let fall, the first time they had walked together: "Mr. Garrott do you know who Marna reminded me of? Somebody you admire a great deal...."
And then for half an hour, his writer's mind insisted on working over and over that detestable conversation between Marna and her father, and changing it a little, just a little touch here and there, to make it fit smoothly upon Mrs. Wing and Mary....