“Somebody’s been getting at you.” He was rather startled by the turn affairs were taking. “You’re not yourself this morning. Tell me, Puss, don’t you care for me any more?”
He looked into her troubled face with an anxiety which made her feel that she wanted to cry. In fact she had to bite her lip pretty hard to save herself from exposing a most regrettable weakness. “It’s because I care for you so much that I can’t let you make a fool of yourself.” The quaint voice trembled oddly. “If you marry me it’s ruin and—and that’s all there is to it.”
He took a little white-gloved paw—she was looking most charmingly spick and span this morning—into his great brown fist. “Rot! A promise is a promise. I won’t give you up.”
“Don’t be a fool.” Pain, sheer and exquisite, drove her to speak bluntly and harshly. “I’d be a cuckoo in the nest. I don’t belong. I won’t amuse you always. And then you’d be sorry about the Towers. And you’d curse yourself for quitting the Army.”
“I’ll risk all that.”
Mame had a struggle to keep her lip stiff. But she had enough will to say, “There’s other folks to think of, you see.”
“Rot! Why let ’em come spoiling the sport?”
“I’d be spoiling the sport. You and Gwendolen were getting on like a house on fire till I came by.”
“What’s come over you!” This was pure Quixotism. Slow in the uptake as he was, he knew how she hated Gwendolen.
“You don’t know what a friend Vi has been to me. I owe just everything to her. If I butted in and spoiled it all, I’d never be able to look her in the face again. Then there’s your Mommer. She’s been so sweet to me, I’d just hate to go back on her.”