"Of course I know I'm not in your class," Griff was going on. "I wouldn't do such a thing as ask you to marry me. But I'm awfully fond of you ... and you're up against it."
"Yes, Griff, I'm up against it."
"Your fine friends ... what would they do for you?"
"Nothing whatever."
"Well, then ... you needn't go under your own name, and this is a chance; you could live and maybe get somewhere. Lowe told me he meant to strike for Broadway. You aren't insulted, are you?"
"No, I'm not insulted." Curiously that was true. I was drunk and shaking inside of me; I seemed to be poised upon the dizzying edge, but I was neither angry nor insulted.
"And I'd never come back on you if you got your chance for yourself ... honest to God, Olive. I've had my lesson at that. You believe me, don't you?"
I believed him. I hadn't any sense whatever of the moral values of the situation. It was too desperate for that.
"I guess I ought to tell you ... I'm a bad sort ... bad with women. After I knew that my—that Miss Dean didn't want me, I didn't care what became of me. There was a woman in the company ... she liked me, and I thought it would give Laura a chance. That was what the divorce was about. I thought I could make it up to the other woman by marrying her. But that didn't work either." He was silent a while, forgetting perhaps that he had begun to explain himself to me. "There's a way you've got to like a person to live with them ... and, anyway, I'm not asking you to marry me." He got as much satisfaction out of that as if it were a superior abnegation.
"You've got to decide, right away," Griffin urged me.