"Very well, then—we understand each other." She turned to Logan, who had sprung to his feet and tried to interfere a couple of times while she talked. "And please remember that this arrangement does not go beyond us three," she said. "I would prefer that no one else knew how matters stood."
Logan looked a little baffled. He was ten years older than either of them, but so many actual clashing things happening had never come his way before. His ten years' advantage had been spent writing stylistic essays, and such do not fit one for stepping down into the middle of a lot of primitive young emotions. He felt suddenly helpless before these passionate, unjust, emotional young people. He felt a little forlorn, too, as if the main currents of things had been sweeping them by while he stood carefully on the bank, trying not to get his feet wet. A very genuine emotion of pity for Marjorie had brought him up here, pity more mixed with something else than he had been willing to admit. It was the first thing he had done for a long, long time that was romantic and unconsidered and actual. And it appeared that, after all, he wasn't needed. Concentration on the nuances of minor fifteenth-century poets had unfitted him for being swept on, as these had been, by the world-currents. They had married each other, pushed by the mating instinct in the air—the world's insistence on marriage to balance the death that had swept it. Now they were struggling to find their balance against each other, to be decent, to be fair, to make themselves and each other what they thought they ought to be. He could see what they were doing and why much more clearly than they could themselves. But he couldn't be a part of it—he had stood aside from life too long, with his nerves and his passion for artistic details and pleasures of the intellect.
But he bowed quietly, and smiled a little. He felt suddenly very tired.
"Certainly it shall go no farther," he assured her. "And I owe you an apology for the trouble which I fear I have ignorantly brought upon you. If there is anything I can say——"
She shook her head proudly, and Francis, fronting them both, made a motion of negation, too.
"You must be tired," he added to his gesture. "Or would you care to watch the dancers awhile?"
"No, I thank you," said Mr. Logan courteously in his turn. "If you will tell me of some near-by hotel——"
"There's only this," explained Francis. "But I think your room is ready by now. Miss O'Mara—I'll call her—will show you to it."
Peggy, summoned by a signal whistle from the ballroom, convoyed Logan upstairs with abundant good-will and much curiosity. She had never seen any one like him before, and took in his looks and belongings with the intense and frank absorption of an Indian. Indeed, as she explained to Marjorie, whom she met at the foot of the stairs, it was only by the help of the saints and her own good decency that she didn't follow him into his room and stay there to watch him unpack.
"With the charming, purry voice he has, and all the little curlicues when he finishes his words, and the little cane—does he never sleep without it, would you say?—and the little Latin books he reads——"