“At present, just your friend. You need a friend, and I need one. We have been enemies a good while. Let us forget that, and be friends again.”
“Mere friendship with you would never satisfy me, Sibyl. You know that as well as I do. Unless I could be your husband, and hold you heart-true to me as my wife, I could never be anything to you.”
Though shaken by his emotions he spoke with unusual determination. Thoughts of Plimpton aroused whatever militant manhood there was in him. For the instant he felt that he ought to have killed Plimpton, and that his flight had been the flight of a coward. Sibyl saw that she was approaching him from the wrong side.
“Yet mere friendship, as you call it, is a good thing. The friendship between Mary and myself, for instance, and that between you and Justin—you will not say they are worthless. You even came up to Denver, I think, to see Justin, because you could not bear to be separated long from him.”
He looked at her earnestly, with a mental question.
“Don’t put your hands on him!”
“Don’t be a fool!” she said. “Why should I? But I won’t beg for the favor of your friendship. I thought we might be friends, good friends. You could establish yourself here in the city, and we could see each other occasionally, if nothing else. I am a better woman than I used to be, a very much better woman than you will believe me to be. Mary has done that for me. And I suppose you thought I would ruin her? That shows that you never understood me.”
“I couldn’t stay here in Denver!” he protested.
“We might be even more than friends, some time,” she urged sweetly.
“Sibyl,” he seemed about to rise from his chair, but sank back, “if I could believe you!”