“What do you mean, Mary?” He was almost unconscious of using the name.
“That I am no different from the others. I came here with the same starved heart and woman’s hopes, and I put into your career the devotion and service and very prayers that I should have put into a home and a family––your joys were my joys, your problems mine. It has not been my clever brain that has made me worth so much to you. That is what the superficial public says, but I know better. It’s been the love––yes, the love for you that has made me indispensable! The unreturned and unsuspected and I presume wicked love I felt for you. And now I’ve told you––broken precedent and told the truth. 194 And as you don’t love me you’ll feel very uncomfortable with me about. And you won’t want to play off pal; you’ll fight shy of me except for everyday work. So it has been the only square thing to do––humiliate myself into telling.
“I love you, I always have, and I always will––but I’m no home-wrecking, emotional being and I expect that you will resume our old relationships and I shall go on serving you and knowing my recompense will be a handsome farewell gift and a pension.
“Oh, the business woman’s life isn’t all beer and skittles. We’re expected to lie about our hearts, yet be as reliable as an adding machine about our columns of figures; to be shut away from the social world, thrown with men more hours a day than their wives see them and yet remain immovable, aloof, disinterested! Just good fellows, you know. Isn’t it hideous to think I’ve really told the truth?”
At this identical moment their platonic friendship, alias tropical twilight, ended, and Mary’s evening star of romance rose to stay. But such being the case Steve was the last person in the world to try to convince her that it was so.
All he said was: “I never appreciated you before. Please don’t feel that telling me this will make any difference save that I’ll stay aloof––as you suggest. I can forget it, somewhat, if that will make you feel any better about it. It is all quite true and equally hopeless––true things usually are––and if you like I’ll send you home in the car, because you must be a trifle tired.”
“Thank you,” she remembered answering as she told Steve’s chauffeur where to drive.
“You look as tired as before we went away,” Luke 195 complained that same night when Mary sat at her desk adding up expenses and making out checks.
“Oh, no. This shade makes everyone look ghastly,” she said.
“I’ll have to get a hump on and make my pile,” he consoled. “I don’t want my sister being all tired out before she’s too old to have a good time.”