“And—oh it's just being silly and tired I suppose, but all of them together—”
“I know,” said Oliver and hoped his voice had sounded appropriately bitter. “No reflections on you or Peter, El, you both understand and you've both been too nice for words—but some of the others sometimes—”
“Oh I'm sorry,” said Elinor contritely, and Oliver felt somewhat as if he were swindling her out of sympathy she probably needed for herself by deliberately calling attention to his own cut finger. But it had to be done—there wasn't any sense in both of them, he and Ted, walking crippled when one of them might be able to doctor the other up by just giving up a little pride. He went on.
“So I thought—I'd just stay around here with a book or something—get some tea from your mother, later, if she were here—”
“Why, I can do that much for you, Ollie, anyway. Let's have it now.”
“But look here, if you were going to do anything—” knowing that after that she could hardly say so, even if she were.
“Oh no. And besides, with both of us here and both of us blue it would be silly if we went and were melancholy at each other from opposite sides of the house.” She tried to be enthusiastic. “And there's strawberry jam and muffins somewhere—the kind that Peter makes himself such a pig about—”
“Well, Elinor, you certainly are a friend—”
A little later, in a quiet corner of the porch with the tea-steam floating pleasantly from the silver nose of its pot and a decorous scarlet and yellow still-life of muffins and jam between them, Oliver felt that so far things had slid along as well as could be expected. Elinor's manners in the first place and her genuine liking for him in the second had come to his help as he knew they would—she was too concerned now with trying to comfort him in small unobtrusive ways to be on her guard herself about her own troubles. All he had to do, he knew, was to sit there and look ostentatiously brokenhearted to have the conversation move in just the directions he wished and that, though it made him feel shameless was not exactly difficult—all he required was a single thought of the last three weeks to make his acting sour perfection itself. “Greater love hath no man than this,” he thought with a grotesque humor—he wondered if any of the celebrated story-book patterns of friendship from Damon and Jonathan on would have found things quite so easy if they had had to take not their lives but most of their most secret and painful inwards and put them down on a tea-table like a new species of currant bun under the eyes of a friendly acquaintance to help their real friends.
“I can't tell you how awfully decent it was of you and Peter,” he began finally after regarding a buttered muffin for several minutes as if it were part of the funeral decorations for dead young love. “Asking me out here, just now. Oh I'll write you a charming bread-and-butter letter of course—but I wanted to tell you really—” He stopped and let the sentence hang with malice aforethought. Elinor's move. Trust Elinor. And the trust was justified for she answered as he wanted her to, and at once.