"This constitutes no slight to you, dear friend."
"No," she said, "very certainly it is no slight. On the contrary, it is very beautiful; but it's an awful responsibility, too."
She sat quite still, her head carried high, her hands clasped in her lap.
"I've underrated the position, I see. I've only thought of myself so far and how you pleased me. But though I'm pretty cheeky, too—almost as cheeky as little Dot—I never had the presumption to put the affair the other way about."
Poppy began to sway slightly again and pat the palms of her hands together between her knees.
"It's been a game, the finest game I've ever played; and I swore by all my gods to play fair. But, as you look at it, our friendship amounts to a good deal more than a game. It goes very deep. And I'm not sure—. no, I'm not—whether I'm equal to it."
She glanced at Iglesias strangely through the clinging grey of the dusk.
"Dear unknown," she said, "I give you my word I'm frightened—I who've never been frightened at any man yet. In my own little way I've played pitch and toss with their hearts and made footballs of them—except that poor young fellow—I told you about him the first time we met—who gave me the scarf, and whose people wouldn't let him marry me. But this affair with you is different. It goes very far, it means—it means nothing short of revolution for me, of putting away and renouncing very much."
Poppy got up, stood pushing her hair back with both hands from her forehead. Then she moved across to the further side of the fireplace. Dominic had risen also. He stood on the near side of the hearth. He was penetrated with the conviction that a crisis was upon them both, involving all the happiness of their future relation to one another.
"You don't understand," Poppy cried passionately. "And I don't want you to understand—that's half the trouble. I want to keep you. Your friendship's the loveliest thing I've ever had. And yet I don't know. For I'm not one woman—I'm half-a-dozen women, and they all pull all sorts of ways so that I daren't trust myself. I want to keep you, I tell you, I want horribly to keep you. Yet I'm ghastly afraid I'm not equal to it. The price is too big."