"But why don't—Carl, why don't you—why can't you care more now?"
"Why, I do care! You're one of the bulliest pals I have, you and Ray."
"And Ray!"
She flung his hand away and sat bolt up, angry.
Carl retired to a chair beside the Morris chair, fidgeting. "Can you beat it! Is this Gertie and me?" he inquired in a parenthesis in his heart. For a second, as she stared haughtily at him, he spitefully recalled the fact that Gertie had once discarded him for a glee-club dentist. But he submerged the thought and listened with a rather forced big-brother air as she repented of her anger and went on:
"Carl, don't you understand how hard it is for a woman to forget her pride this way?" The hauteur of being one of the élite of Joralemon again flashed out. "Maybe if you'll think real hard you'll remember I used to could get you to be so kind and talk to me without having to beg you so hard. Why, I'd been to New York and known the nicest people before you'd ever stirred a foot out of Joralemon! You were——Oh, please forgive me, Carl; I didn't mean to be snippy; I just don't know what to think of myself—and I did used to think I was a lady, and here I am practically up and telling you and——"
She leaned from her chair toward his, and took his hand, touching it, finding its hard, bony places and the delicate white hollows of flesh between his coarsened yet shapely fingers; tracing a scarce-seen vein on the back; exploring a well-beloved yet ill-known country. Carl was unspeakably disconcerted. He was thinking that, to him, Gertie was set aside from the number of women who could appeal physically, quite as positively as though she were some old aunt who had for twenty years seemed to be the same adult, plump, uninteresting age. Gertie's solid flesh, the monotony of her voice, the unimaginative fixity of her round cheeks, a certain increasing slackness about her waist, even the faint, stuffy domestic scent of her—they all expressed to him her lack of humor and fancy and venturesomeness. She was crystallized in his mind as a good friend with a plain soul and sisterly tendencies. Awkwardly he said:
"You mustn't talk like that.... Gee! Gertie, we'll be in a regular 'scene,' if you don't watch out!... We're just good friends, and you can always bank on me, same as I would on you."
"But why must we be just friends?"
He wanted to be rude, but he was patient. Mechanically stroking her hair again, leaning forward most uncomfortably from his chair, he stammered: "Oh, I've been——Oh, you know; I've wandered around so much that it's kind of put me out of touch with even my best friends, and I don't know where I'm at. I couldn't make any alliances——Gee! that sounds affected. I mean: I've got to sort of start in now all over, finding where I'm at."