He was too tired now, though; he no longer wanted to hear anything that she had to say; all the colour had faded out of his dream. He would not open his eyes and look at Margot again.
“Jean, you’ll come back to me? Yes! Yes! do go away for a change directly you are strong enough,” Margot went on, taking her hat-pins in and out of her hat. “Nothing matters that you’ve said, nothing that you feel could make any difference to us really! We must go on! we must help each other all we can. Jean, I may ask this of you, mayn’t I?”
“You may ask anything that you like of me, Margot,” said Jean; “and there’s nothing that I would refuse you.”
And then Margot knew quite well how little he had loved her.
CHAPTER XVIII
JEAN had told Margot that the one thing he would never forgive was interference in his concerns. No friend, he had explained, had the right to force upon him such an indignity. One might willingly consent to being under an obligation to a friend, but to receive a compulsory and unconscious benefit behind one’s back was a wound to the personal honour which nothing could ever heal.
Such service was worse than enmity; it was more intimate and less forgivable.
Margot listened humbly to this statement of Jean’s views; she thought how noble he was; and then it occurred to her that he need never find out.
After all, the great thing was that Jean should be helped, and Margot had never felt that it was at all necessary she should be noble. Jean was Jean, but when you came to think of it, it was almost a moral convenience that Margot was only Margot.
On the day after Jean’s disastrous proposal of marriage Margot mysteriously left him. She said she had occasion to take the air—and she took it, after having made a toilette peculiarly ambitious for so simple a purpose. Jean was not, of course, offended with Margot; at the same time he was sufficiently hurt to evince no curiosity. She had not broken his heart, but there would have been something inappropriate in his expressing any wish to know why she wore her best hat and did her hair in the most complicated manner.