“I guess you've been wondering why you haven't heard from me,” he said. “I've seen you more than you've seen me.”
Sidney looked uneasy. The idea of espionage is always repugnant, and to have a rejected lover always in the offing, as it were, was disconcerting.
“I wish you would be just a little bit sensible, Joe. It's so silly of you, really. It's not because you care for me; it's really because you care for yourself.”
“You can't look at me and say that, Sid.”
He ran his finger around his collar—an old gesture; but the collar was very loose. He was thin; his neck showed it.
“I'm just eating my heart out for you, and that's the truth. And it isn't only that. Everywhere I go, people say, 'There's the fellow Sidney Page turned down when she went to the hospital.' I've got so I keep off the Street as much as I can.”
Sidney was half alarmed, half irritated. This wild, excited boy was not the doggedly faithful youth she had always known. It seemed to her that he was hardly sane—that underneath his quiet manner and carefully repressed voice there lurked something irrational, something she could not cope with. She looked up at him helplessly.
“But what do you want me to do? You—you almost frighten me. If you'd only sit down—”
“I want you to come home. I'm not asking anything else now. I just want you to come back, so that things will be the way they used to be. Now that they have turned you out—”
“They've done nothing of the sort. I've told you that.”