“You defended me against Milliken!”
“I tried to.”
“Can’t you defend me against yourself, Marcia?”
He could hear her long, slow-drawn breath before she answered. “I could defend you against yourself, in my own heart. But I cannot defend the ideal of you that I had built up, against what you have done to it.”
“Could n’t you have told me?”
“Told you what, Jem?”
“That I did represent an ideal to you..Think what it would have meant to me to—to know that.”
Something told him that she was smiling in the darkness and that there was pain and pity as well as a sweet mockery in the smile. “Could I tell you that before you told me—what you have told me to-night?”
“That I love you? You can’t pretend that you did n’t know it. But I’d no business to tell you then: I’ve no business to tell you now,” he added gloomily. “What have I got to offer a girl like you!”
“That would not matter,” she answered him proudly. “It is the other that matters.”