"It doesn't seem to have rested you," Sommers answered. "You are tired or worried."
"Worse yet!" she laughed nervously. "Clearly, you won't do. You must go back to Marion."
She looked up at him from her low seat with brilliant, mocking eyes.
"I have thought of that. It would not be the worst thing that could happen.
Would you think it possible—Marion?" he asked clumsily.
Her eyes did not fall, but rested steadily on his face. Under this clear gaze his remark appeared to him preposterous. She seemed to show him how precipitate, unformed,—crude, as she said,—all his acts were. Instead of answering his question, she said gently:
"Yes, you are right. I am worried, and I came here tonight to escape it. But one doesn't escape worries with you. One increases them. You make me feel guilty, uncomfortable. Now get me something thoroughly cold, and perhaps we can have that long-promised talk."
When Sommers returned with a glass of champagne, a number of men had gathered about Miss Hitchcock, and she left him on the outside, intentionally it seemed, while she chatted with them, bandying allusions that meant nothing to him. Sommers saw that he had been a bore. He slipped out of the group and wandered into the large library, where the guests were eating and drinking. A heavy, serious man, whom he had seen at various places, spoke to him. He said something about the lecture, then something about Miss Polot's engagement. "They'll go to New York," he ventured. "Stewart has some position there, some family." He talked about the Stewarts and the Polots, and finally he went to the dressing room to smoke.
Sommers had made up his mind to leave, and was looking for Mrs. Carson, when he came across Miss Hitchcock again.
"The man you were talking with is quite a tragedy," she said unconcernedly, picking up the conversation where she had dropped it. "I knew him when he left college. He was an athletic fellow, a handsome man. His people were nice, but not rich. He was planning to go to Montana to take a place in some mines, but he got engaged to the daughter of a very wealthy man. He didn't go. He married Miss Prudence Fisher, and he has simply grown fat. It's an old story—"
"And a tragic enough one. We ought to change the old proverb, 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a poor man to marry a rich man's daughter.'"
"It ought not to be so, if the man were a man."