"Yes. We thought it was such a pity that you went about with all these men. She told me how splendid you were in France. She had thought that I was in love with you, but I told her of course that I'd always thought of you as a man almost. Love was a different sort of thing.... Although to-night at the boxing you weren't a man, either. Anyway——"
She cut short his halting, confused explanation with contempt.
"You'd better go. You and Margery have treated me pretty badly between you. Good-night."
He tried to say something, but the sight of her furious eyes checked him. Without another word he went. The door closed; the room was suddenly intensely silent, as though it were waiting to hear the echo of his step.
She stood, fury, contempt, working in her face. Suddenly her eyes flooded with tears. Her brow puckered. She flung herself down on the floor beside the sofa, and burying her face in it cried, with complete abandonment, from her breaking heart.
[IX]
MR. NIX
Mr. Nix, the manager of Hortons, had never been an analyser of the human character: it startled him, therefore, considerably, somewhere about March or April of 1919, to find himself deep in introspection.
What is deep to one may not be deep to another, and Mr. Nix's introspection amounted to little more than that he felt, as he found himself confiding to a friend one evening, as though he "were nothing more or less than a blooming juggler—one of those fellows, Joe, that tosses eight or ten balls in the air at a time. That's what I'm doing, positively."
"If you ask me," said his friend, "what you're doing, Sam, is thinking too much about yourself—being morbidly introspective, that's what you're being. I should drop it. That kind of thing grows."