“It’s a difficult business for me, Gage,” he said, “but I’ve got to go through with it. She must leave the office. We can’t afford scandal.”
“Suppose I won’t discharge her?”
“I’m not supposing any such nonsense. You aren’t going to act that way unless you’re crazy.”
Sable looked at him.
“It means a smash probably. Don’t let’s talk foolishness. You know you’ve got too much tied up in this business to let it go. You couldn’t afford to say you smashed up your business for a woman. That’s not the way things are done. I can’t insist on your giving up the girl but I can ask you to remove the scandal from an office in which not alone your name is involved.”
“Such rotten minds,” thought Gage, almost without anger. He was feeling curiously clear and light and deft. He had felt that way ever since he had found how Freda felt. Something had been strengthened in his own philosophy by her simple refusal to share her secret with every one. She put other things higher than the opinion of gossip. So must he.
They let the thing ride for a few days. Gage thought of nothing else and found himself dreaming a great deal when he should have been working, according to Sable. He also found that Helen was becoming almost anti-pathetic to him. She was to make the seconding speech for one of the candidates at Chicago and was busy with its preparation. There were conferences constantly, and she had allowed a picture of herself with her children to be syndicated. Gage found it before him everywhere and it enraged him. He felt it on his raw mind as an advertisement of the result of their love, as a dragging into publicity of the last bond between them.
“I feel like the husband of a moving picture actress,” he told her, viciously, one day.
She said what she had never meant to say. She was tired and full of worrying and important matters. Gage and his brooding seemed childish and morbid. And she had her own secret grievance.