“Oh, Gord!”
“You had known me so long—I had grown up with you and showed myself such a rotter before you straightened me out—that there would have been little real romance in it, between you and me, if I had been the man. I felt a little bitter over it when I first heard. But a fellow learns a lot of things in such a Big Show as we’ve just ended. He learns not to whimper if luck goes against him. But aside from that—there was yet another reason.”
For a moment they surveyed one another. Of the two, Madelaine was the most perturbed. Perturbed because after her half-year propinquity with Nathan, everything which her fiancé possessed stood forth so sharply by contrast with the man who faced her now.
Nathan had calm eyes. Gordon’s eyes were not calm. They were troubled. Nathan had hard-muscled jaws and philosophical lips. Gordon had—well, just a mouth, and it was a bit too harsh. Nathan carried himself gravely, shoulders well back, feet on the ground. Gordon had a proclivity toward a slight, slender, patrician slouch. Nathan had talon hands, a man’s hands, made to grasp, create, build, deal sledge-hammer blows. Gordon’s hands were lithe, pink, neatly manicured, made to handle a cigarette gracefully.
Yet Gordon was no less a man than Nathan. He was simply a different type of man.
Comparing the two now, however, Madelaine understood why she had never been able to abandon herself to Gordon. Being very feminine, she had hungered for the virility of Nathan’s jaws and hands and iron arms.
“You’re going to Chicago and Kansas, Gordon? Why?”
“I am going to be married, Madge.”
“Married!”
“I have told Aunt Gracia why. When I’m gone, she will explain. You think it strange perhaps—after what happened here in this room when we parted. But when I knew I had lost, with you—and then one night Over Across when I got in a pinch where I had no assurance I would live until morning, I did some vital thinking, Madge. I found there were many things in my life which, if I had the chance, I would rectify. I was spared to rectify them. I did a rotten thing by another girl once, Madge. And I choose to think I lost you because I dared approach you without my debt to another woman paid in full. At any rate, without trying to make a hero of myself in this distressing explanation, I—well—I found the girl loved me very dearly and had married another man whom she did not love because he was willing to have her after—after—well, to speak the brutal truth, in army slang—after I’d ‘made hamburg’ of her life. We’re to be married, I say, and we’re going out to Kansas. I shall try to nurse the girl back to—to—what she was when I met her. My treatment made her a nervous wreck.”