“Your predicament?”
“I can’t keep it quiet, even if I want to! Don’t you see? Now that I’ve settled down into a steady business man—your doing!—all parties are willing that Maisie and I should at once be formally engaged and then be married in a very short time. Father’s pushing it across as though it were a big option that expired to-morrow. Get the fix that puts me in? There are only three things for me to do. Run away from it all, in which case dad’ll be done with me as long as he lives. Or say I won’t go through with the thing with Maisie, and give no reasons—which means the same result. Or else come right out with the truth that I’m married to you. See my fix?”
Mary saw; and swiftly judging her many-angled situation she saw that, however pressing other matters might be, this matter of the other girl was the first business that must be somehow adjusted if she were to realize her vaulting dreams—if she were to pass through the Golden Doors. And as she perceived this, she had an instant’s realization, that this business of gaining the worldly heights, which had at the inception of her plan seemed so simple and easily achievable, was every day becoming more complicated, more tortuous. Again Clifford’s grim words flashed briefly back: “I’ll leave it to Life to test you.”...
“So, you see, I might just as well come across with the truth about our marriage!” Jack exclaimed. “It’s the best way out of the fix!”
Mary hardly heard him; she was rapidly considering this new problem. “You’ve never told me how it came about, this arrangement with Miss Jones.”
“Oh, just the way such matters usually happen. Maisie and I have known each other for a long time; there’s been a sort of unspoken understanding in our families that some day we’d get married—and I guess I fell right in with it. You see, I rather liked Maisie, and I’d never thought much about such affairs, and it didn’t make much difference. But—well, you know, I haven’t been behaving very well; and her people said there’d be nothing doing unless I straightened out. Since you’ve set me to work and kept me working, they’ve recalled their veto—and it’s all right with them. That’s about the size of the situation.”
“What’s her attitude toward you?”
“Maisie’s? I guess Maisie rather likes me. In fact,” he confessed, “though I don’t deserve it, Maisie really likes me a lot.”
“What’s she like?” Mary asked quickly.
“You mean looks, or—or personally?”