“Then it is love.”
“But I do love you, Red Cloud.”
“And you say you love him. You can’t love both of us.”
“But I can. I do. I do love both of you.—Oh, I am straight. I shall be straight. I must work this out. I thought you might help me. That is why I came to you this morning. There must be some solution.”
She looked at him appealingly as he answered, “It is one or the other, Evan or me. I cannot imagine any other solution.”
“That’s what he says. But I can’t bring myself to it. He was for coming straight to you. I would not permit him. He has wanted to go, but I held him here, hard as it was on both of you, in order to have you together, to compare you two, to weigh you in my heart. And I get nowhere. I want you both. I can’t give either of you up.”
“Unfortunately, as you see,” Dick began, a slight twinkle in his eyes, “while you may be polyandrously inclined, we stupid male men cannot reconcile ourselves to such a situation.”
“Don’t be cruel, Dick,” she protested.
“Forgive me. It was not so meant. It was out of my own hurt—an effort to bear it with philosophical complacence.”
“I have told him that he was the only man I had ever met who is as great as my husband, and that my husband is greater.”