And he had felt a trifle chilled.
It was not a part of Marion's program to enter the Spencer family unwelcomed. She had a furtive fear of Clayton Spencer, the fear of the indirect for the direct, of the designing woman for the essentially simple and open male. It was not on her cards to marry Graham and to try to live on his salary.
So for a few weeks the engagement was concealed even from Mrs. Hayden, and Graham, who had received some stock from his father on his twenty-first birthday, secretly sold a few shares and bought the engagement ring. With that Marion breather easier. It was absolute evidence.
Her methods were the methods of her kind and her time. To allure a man by every wile she knew, and having won him to keep him uncertain and uneasy, was her perfectly simple creed. So she reduced love to its cheapest terms, passion and jealousy, played on them both, and made Graham alternately happy and wretched.
Once he found Rodney Page there, lounging about with the manner of a habitue. It seemed to Graham that he was always stumbling over Rodney those days, either at home, with drawings and color sketches spread out before him, or at the Hayden house.
“What's he hanging around here for?” he demanded when Rodney, having bent over Marion's hand and kissed it, had gone away. “If he could see that bare spot on the top of his head he'd stop all that kow-towing.”
“You're being rather vulgar, aren't you?” Marion had said. “He's a very old friend and a very dear one.”
“Probably in love with you once, like all the rest?”
He had expected denial from her, but she had held her cigaret up in the air, and reflectively regarded its small gilt tip.
“I'm afraid he's rather unhappy. Poor Rod!”