“Ah, that's difficult!”
There was silence for a moment between them, then she added perversely—
“And, you know, faith is not what it was.”
Duff sat biting his lips. Her dryness irritated him. He was accustomed to find in her fields of delicately blooming enthusiasms, and running watercourses where his satisfactions were ever reflected. Suddenly she seemed to emerge to her own consciousness, upon a summit from which she could look down upon the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he stood.
“Don't make a mistake,” she said. “Don't.” She thrust her hand for a fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew it, gathering herself together to meet what he might say.
What he did say was simple, and easy to hear. “That's what everybody will tell me; but I thought you might understand.” He tapped the toe of his boot with his stick as if he counted the strokes. She looked down and counted them too.
“Then you won't help me to marry her?” he said, definitely, at last.
“What could I do?” She twisted her sapphire ring. “Ask somebody else.”
“Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid colours of the lost.”
The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles, and the cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her elegance; the poise of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she looked too amusedly at his difficulty. Her negative, too, was more unsympathetic than he had any reason to expect.