Cleland laughed:
"That sounds convincing. What a little brick she is! I suppose you're lunching with her."
"Rather!" He looked at his watch. "God knows," he added, "I don't want to bore her, but it would take a machine gun to drive me away.... I tell you, Cleland, three years of what I went through leave scars that never entirely heal.... I don't yet quite see how she could forgive me."
"Has she?"
"I'm trying to understand that she has. I know she has, because she says so. But it's hard to comprehend.... She's a very, very wonderful woman, Cleland."
"I can see that."
"And whatever she wishes, I wish. Whatever she desires to do is absolutely all right because she desires it. But, do you know, Cleland, she's sweet enough to ask my opinion? Think of it!—think of her asking my opinion!—willing to consider my wishes after what I've done to her! I tell you no man can study faithfully enough, minutely enough, the character of the girl he loves. I've had my lesson—a terrible one. I told you once that it was killing me—would end me some day. It would have if she had not held out her hand to me.... It was the finest, noblest thing any woman has ever done."
All fat men are prone to nervous emotion; Belter got up briskly, but his features were working, and he merely waved his hand in adieu and galloped off down stairs to be in time to join his wife when she emerged from her seance with the white circus horse in Helen's outer workshop.
Cleland, still lingering with fluttering solicitude over his manuscript, heard a step on the stair and Stephanie's fresh young voice in gay derision:
"You're like a fussy old hen, Jim! Let that chick alone and take me somewhere to lunch! I've had a strenuous lesson and I'm starved——"