"Nothing. I'm only the Infant to them. If they did think anything about it it wouldn't make any special difference. They'd think it was a lovely joke."
"You mean even if they knew that I am in love with you?"
She gave him a glowing glance. "They'd say, 'Little Pat's gone and snared herself a real live man.' You don't know this family." Suddenly she drew away from him, jumped to her feet, and darted to the door, where she stood smiling and poised. "What's it all coming to, anyway?" she laughed.
What, indeed? Scott put the question to himself, but in no spirit of laughter.
Toward womankind Cary Scott had much of the continental attitude. Since the separation from his wife and the freedom of action which it implied, he had played the game of passion, real or counterfeit, in sundry places and with sundry partners, always married women hitherto, and always within the code as he interpreted it. But there remained in him enough of the American to inhibit him from the thought of a purposeful siege upon a young, unmarried girl of a household wherein he was a professed friend. Besides, he loved Pat too well, he told himself, to harm her.
It was incredible; it was shameful; it was damnable; but this child, this petite gamine, this reckless, careless, ignorant, swift-witted, unprincipled, selfish, vain, lovable, impetuous, bewildering, seductive, half-formed girl had taken his heart in her two strong, shapely woman-hands, and claimed it away from him—for what? A toy? A keepsake? A treasure?
What future was there for this abrupt and blind encounter of his manhood and her womanhood?
He could find no answer. But of one fact he was appallingly certain: that all the radiance, the glamour wherewith he had surrounded the figure of Mona, all the desire which the soft loveliness, the reluctant half-yielding of Constance had inspired in him, were merged and submerged in the passion that had swept him into Pat's eager and clinging arms.
To what bitter and perhaps absurd end? For he was bound, and she hardly more than a playful child. He recalled her strange look as she had left him. What might one read in it? A glow of possessiveness? A gleam of bright mockery? Or the undecipherable Sphinxhood of the woman triumphant who knows herself loved?