Jim showed his hurt as his plans crashed to the ground.
“Just as you say, dear. I only suggested it because I was silly enough to think we might play around together there a lot and have a real rest.”
“But surely you don’t expect me to go under Rose Hubbell’s chaperonage, Jim. Why, think, Jim—dozens of people know her whole history and—— Think how impossible it would be for me.”
“I didn’t count on seeing much of her, you see,” said poor Jim, trying to defend not Rose Hubbell, but his own care and protection of Horatia. “And she would have been just a nominal chaperon. But I see that I was a fool. Just consider the suggestion cancelled, will you, darling? Put it out of your head absolutely.”
He drew her close to him and may have been simple enough to fancy his request had been granted. But thoughts were spinning madly around in Horatia’s head. This outrageously silly plan of Jim’s seemed to clinch the whole matter of Rose Hubbell. If Rose could make him believe that such an arrangement was all right—that it was all right to take the girl he was going to marry away under the chaperonage of a woman about whom he had been the co-respondent in a divorce suit, she could make him believe black was white. She felt older than Jim for once—responsible for him. With an instinctive feminine reaction she refused to blame the man. It was a matter between her and Mrs. Hubbell.
“Jim,” she said softly, “don’t you think the time has come for you to give up Rose Hubbell?”
Jim started. “How on earth could I give her up? She’s nothing to me, Horatia. Child, you surely don’t dream——”
The word “child” offended Horatia.
“No—of course I don’t think you are in love with her—or anything like that. But I think she thinks she has a hold on you and that she intends to play it for what it’s worth. She has a little proprietary air—and I think she has an influence over you which you don’t realize and that for your good you shouldn’t see her any more at all.”
The youth of Horatia, hurling such statements at any man and worst of all at the man who wished to be especially fine and strong in her eyes! She went on, a little flurried and feeling her way.