“Pure habit, I suppose,” she answered lightly, “but it ought to give you satisfaction that I’m sorry both of us haven’t. You needn’t be frightened, even though Helen has the absurd notion of throwing me at your head now. You see what I am—just dregs. Mother and Helen have never got over thinking me a young girl, and they’ve always planned for you to marry whatever was left of me after they’d finished.”
“I’ve never been very proud of my own behavior,” I put in. “I ought to have been able to make you marry me back there, but—”
“You were no match for mother.” Margaret ended the sentence for me. “Nobody ever was. But even she shouldn’t have expected to keep that old affair in cold storage for twenty years. I’m a baby to be complaining, but I can’t help it this once. Things are so terribly dead that I can safely tell you now that you ought to marry—not that I suppose you have been restrained on my account for some fifteen years! I’m merely showing you my death-certificate in the hope that you’ll avoid my unhappy end.”
“But, Margaret, what are you going to do?” I cried, too disturbed by the situation not to realize that she had diagnosed it correctly.
“Oh, as I’ve said, I’m going to inter myself decently in Italy, where I shall probably write a book about my mother. I can stay away just so much longer.”
At that moment the others came in and stopped whatever reply I could have made.
“So sorry we had to leave you like this,” said Mrs. Bradford, sailing majestically into the room; “but you are such an old friend that we treat you like one of the family, you see.” She smiled in a way that made her meaning plain.
“It doesn’t matter about Bob, of course,” said Charles, who was clearly so much engrossed by his own affairs as to be impervious to anything else. “He and Margaret ought to be able to entertain each other.”
“I think we do very well, thank you,” I remarked with a flicker of amusement. “At least I do.”