She kept her eyes from him. “We understand each other very well now, I think.”
“Now!” he repeated. Helen started to take up the wraps again. He held out his hand. “Wait a minute. I didn’t detain you to pick a quarrel. I wanted to make one last appeal to you.”
“For what?” she asked.
“I can’t stand living like this any longer,” he went on, desperately, throwing off all self-restraint. “I can’t stand the thought of going back to Washington without you. I’m lonely. I’ve been lonely for months. You know that as well as I do.”
She hesitated, trying to control herself. Then she said, without a trace of feeling in her voice: “You have your work. You have as much as I have.”
“You treat me as if you had no regard, no respect, for me. You make me feel like a criminal. I thought when I threw that man West over——”
She looked him straight in the face. “But why did you do it? Not because he was what you knew him to be, but because he had insulted me. That’s what I can’t forget. All these years you knew what he was.”
They stood looking at each other. “And I was just as bad as he was,” he said, in a low voice. “You mean that, don’t you?”
Helen turned away. “I didn’t say that.”
“And is there nothing I can do to make things right between us?”