“Oh yes, it is. It's exactly like me. Like one me. There are others, of course.”
She told him then, making pitiful confession of her own pride and her anxiety to spare Chris's name.
“I couldn't bear to have them suspect he had gone to the war because of a girl. Whatever he ran away from, Clay, he's doing all right now.”
He listened gravely, with, toward the end, a jealousy he would not have acknowledged even to himself. Was it possible that she still loved Chris? Might she not, after the fashion of women, be building a new and idealized Chris, now that he had gone to war, out of his very common clay?
“He has done splendidly,” he agreed.
Again the warmth and coziness of the little room enveloped him. Audrey's low huskily sweet voice, her quick smile, her new and unaccustomed humility, and the odd sense of her understanding, comforted him. She made her indefinite appeal to the best that was in him.
Nothing so ennobles a man as to have some woman believe in his nobility.
“Clay,” she said suddenly, “you are worrying about something.”
“Nothing that won't straighten out, in time.”
“Would it help to talk about it?”