The two women gazed inquiringly at him with sympathetic faces. He was deeply embarrassed, and his embarrassment seemed to accentuate a kind of caste difference between them.
“Yes, Grant,” said Mrs. Nesbit, “of course, we know about Lila and Kenyon. Nothing in the world could please us more than to see them happy together.”
“I know, ma’am,” returned Grant, twirling his chair nervously. “That’s just the trouble. Maybe they can’t be happy together.”
“Why, Grant,” exclaimed Laura, “what’s to hinder?”
“Stuff!” sniffed Mrs. Nesbit.
He looked up then, and the two women could see that he flinched.
“Well,–I don’t know how to say it, but you must know it.” He stopped, and they saw anguish in his face. “But I–Laura,” he turned to the younger woman and made a pitiful gesture with his whole hand, “do you remember back when you were a girl away at school and I stopped writing to you?”
“Yes, Grant,” replied Laura, “so well–so well, and you never would say–”
“Because I had no right to,” he cut in, “it was not my secret–to tell–then.”
Mrs. Nesbit sat impatiently on her chair edge, as one waiting for a foolish formality to pass. She looked at the clumsy, bulky figure of a man in his ill-fitting Sunday clothes, and obviously was rather irritated at his ill-timed interjection of his own childhood affair into an entirely simple problem of true love running smoothly. But her daughter, seeing the anguish in the man’s twisted face, was stricken with a terror in her heart. Laura knew that no light emotion had grappled him, and when her mother said, “Well?” sharply, the daughter rose and went to him, touching his hand gently that had been gripping the chair-back. She said, “Yes, Grant, but why do you have to tell it now?”