"Papa wouldn't let Ally go to her. But he can't stop me."
"Oh, no. Nobody could stop you."
She smiled softly. She had missed the brutality of his emphasis.
* * * * *
He said to himself that Gwenda was impossible. She was obstinate and conceited and wrong-headed. She was utterly selfish, a cold mass of egoism.
"Cold?" He was not so sure. She might be. But she was capable, he suspected, of adventures. Instead of taking her sister away to have her chance, she was rushing off to secure it herself. And the irony of the thing was that it was he who had put it into her head.
Well—she was no worse, and no better—than the rest of them. Only unlike them in the queerness of her fascination. He wondered how long it would have lasted?
You couldn't go on caring for a woman like that, who had never cared a rap about you.
And yet—he could have sworn—Oh, that was nothing. She had only thought of him because he had been her only chance.
He made himself think these things of her because they gave him unspeakable consolation.