"Gordon!" she exclaimed, scarlet with amazement and indignation.
"Personally," he said, unperturbed, "I haven't much sympathy with such affairs. If a man can't marry a girl he ought to leave her alone; that's my idea of the game. But men play it in a variety of ways. Personally, I'd as soon plug a loaded shot-gun with mud and then fire it, as block a man who wants to marry."
"I did block it!" said Lily with angry decision; "and I am glad I did."
"Look out for the explosion then," he said philosophically, and strolled off to see to the setting out of some young hemlocks, headed in the year previous.
Lily Collis was deeply disturbed—more deeply than her pride and her sophistication cared to admit. She strove to believe that such a horror as her husband had hinted at so coolly could never happen to a Neville; she rejected it with anger, with fear, with a proud and dainty fastidiousness that ought to have calmed and reassured her. It did not.
Once or twice she reverted to the subject, haughtily; but Gordon merely shrugged:
"You can't teach a man of twenty-eight when, where, and how to fall in love," he said. "And it's all the more hopeless when the girl possesses the qualities which you once told me this girl possesses."
Lily bit her lip, angry and disconcerted, but utterly unable to refute him or find anything in her memory of Valerie to criticise and condemn, except the intimacy with her brother which had continued and which, she had supposed, would cease on Valerie's promise to her.
"It's very horrid of her to go about with him under the circumstances—knowing she can't marry him if she keeps her word," said Lily.
"Why? Stephanie goes about with him."