"That you are on the defensive with Paula," Treurenberg interrupts him, with a wan smile. "Yes, I have seen it."
"Well, she ought to see it too," Harry mutters.
Lato shrugs his shoulders.
"She must lose patience sooner or later," says Harry.
"It is difficult to exhaust the patience of a young woman whose sensibilities are not very delicate and who is very much in love," his friend replies. "You must devise some other, and--forgive my frankness--some more honest and straightforward means for attaining your end."
Harry puffs furiously at his cigarette, sending a cloud of smoke over the flower-bed. "Lato, you are rough upon me, but not rougher than I am upon myself. If you knew how degraded I feel by my false position, if you knew how the whole matter weighs upon me, you would do something more for me than only hold up a candle by the light of which I perceive more clearly the misery of my position. You would----"
"What?" Lato asks, disturbed.
"Help me!"
Lato looks at him in dismay for a moment, and then stammers, "No, Harry, do not ask it of me,--not of me. I could do you no good. They never would let me speak, any more than my mother-in-law would allow you to speak. And even if I finally prevailed upon them to listen, they would blame me for the whole affair, would believe that I had excited your mind against the family."
"How could they possibly imagine that you could conduct yourself so towards a friend?" Harry asks, with a grim smile.