"I mean the young lady you told Sally about—the young lady you are hesitating to propose to because there'll be what you call complications in medicine—complications about your mamma, to put it plainly.... Oh yes, of course, Sally told me all about it directly." Vereker cannot resist a laugh, for all his embarrassment, a laugh which somehow had the image of Sally in it. "She would, you know. Sally's the sort of party that—that, if she'd been Greek, would have been the daughter of an Arcadian shepherdess and a thunderbolt."
"Of course she would. I say, Fenwick, look here...."
"Have another cigar, old man."
"No, I've smoked enough. That one's lasted all the time since we came out. Look here—what I want to say is ... well, that I was a great fool—did wrong in fact—to talk to Sally about that young lady...."
"And to that young lady about Sally," Fenwick says quietly. For half a second—such alacrity has thought—Vereker takes his meaning wrong; thinks he really believes in the other young lady. Then it flashes on him, and he knows how his companion has been seeing through him all the while. But so lovable is Fenwick, and so much influence is there in the repose of his strength, that there is no resentment on Vereker's part that he should be thus seen through. He surrenders at discretion.
"I see you know," he says helplessly.
"Know you love Sally?—of course I do! So does her mother. So does yours, for that matter. So does every one, except herself. Why, even you yourself know it! She never will know it unless she hears it on the best authority—your own, you know."
"Ought I to tell her? I know I was all wrong about that humbug-girl I cooked up to tell her about. I altogether lost my head, and was a fool."
"I can't see what end you proposed to yourself by doing it," says Fenwick a little maliciously. "If Sally had recommended you to speak up, because it was just possible the young lady might be pining for you all the time, you couldn't have asked her her name, and then said, 'That's hers—you're her!' like the fat boy in 'Pickwick.' No!—I consider, my dear boy, that you didn't do yourself any good by that ingenious fiction. You know all the while you wouldn't have been sorry to think she understood you."