“I don't like her troubling you.”
“Troubling me! She doesn't borrow money, you know. Why, she makes more money from your plant than I have to live on! And she brings me presents of flowers and the most awful embroidery, that she does herself.”
“You ought not to know that side of life.”
She laughed a little bitterly.
“Not know it!” she said. “I've had to know it. I learned it pretty well, too. And don't make any mistake, Clay.” She looked up at him with her clear, understanding gaze. “Being good, decent, with a lot of people is only the lack of temptation. Only, thank God, there are some who have the strength to withstand it when it comes.”
And he read in her clear eyes her promise and her understanding; that they loved each other, that it was the one big thing in both their lives, but that between them there would be only the secret inner knowledge of that love. There would be no shipwreck. And for what she gave, she demanded his strength and his promise. It was to what he read in her face, not to her words, that he replied:
“I'll do my very best, Audrey dear.”
He went back to her rooms with her, and she made him tea, while he built the fire in the open fireplace and nursed it tenderly to a healthy strength. Overnursed it, she insisted. They were rather gay, indeed, and the danger-point passed by safely. There was so much to discuss, she pretended. The President's unfortunate phrase of “peace without victory”; the deportation of the Belgians, the recent leak in Washington to certain stock-brokers, and more and more imminent, the possibility of a state of war being recognized by the government.
“If it comes,” she said, gayly, “I shall go, of course. I shall go to France and sing them into battle. My shorthand looks like a music score, as it is. What will you do?”
“I can't let you outshine me,” he said. “And I don't want to think of your going over there without me. My dear! My dear!”