“Do you think she is going to make an awful fuss?”
CHAPTER XXI
Here my long-cherished resentment toward Roger overflowed. No one could have been with Ellen as I had been without seeing the turmoil in which her spirit lived. She had grown thin and of a certain transparency as do those whose sufferings of the spirit affect their bodies profoundly. I knew there were long times when he didn’t write; I knew how she waited for his letters; I knew how seldom he came. I felt, in my wisdom, that she bore from Roger things I would stand from no man. I had learned, step by step with Ellen, that Ellen’s life and all her happiness were in careless hands and, in Alec’s language, that there was no country of the heart there for her. I looked at Roger with level-eyed disgust.
“Why, Roger,” I asked him, “don’t you break your engagement now, if that’s what you mean to do?”
To my point-blank question, he only stared at me.
“I don’t want to break it,” he said. “Ellen’s just exactly the kind of a woman I want for my wife,” he added.
“But in your good time,” said I bitterly.
He looked at me with his bold, laughing eyes:
“There’s a delight of life with Ellen that I can find with no one else. I know what she is, Roberta, a thousand times more than you. She’s the only alive person in the world, but since you put the words in my mouth, ‘In my own good time!’” He had completely recovered his good-tempered arrogance.