She turned on him. “And what about me? Who sympathizes with me? Do you ever give a moment’s thought to what I’ve had to go through the last few months?”
“I don’t quite know what you mean,” he stammered.
“I should have thought it was obvious. You can’t be such an innocent babe as to suppose people don’t talk about you. They don’t talk to you because they don’t like to be rude. They send you white feathers instead. But they talk to me. ‘Why isn’t Marmaduke in khaki?’ ‘Why isn’t Doggie fighting?’ ‘I wonder how you can allow him to slack about like that!’—I’ve had a pretty rough time fighting your battles, I can tell you, and I deserve some credit. I want sympathy just as much as you do.”
“My dear,” said Doggie, feeling very much humiliated, “I never knew. I never thought. I do see now the unpleasant position you’ve been in. People are brutes. But,” he added eagerly, “you told them the real reason?”
“What’s that?” she asked, looking at him with cold eyes.
Then Doggie knew that the wide world was against him. “I’m not fit. I’ve no constitution. I’m an impossibility.”
“You thought you had nerves until you learned to drive the car. Then you discovered that you hadn’t. You fancy you’ve a weak heart. Perhaps if you learned to walk thirty miles a day you would discover you hadn’t that either. And so with the rest of it.”
“This is very painful,” he said, going to the window and staring out. “Very painful. You are of the same opinion as the young women who sent me that abominable thing.”
She had been on the strain for a long while and something inside her had snapped. At his woebegone attitude she relented however, and came up and touched his shoulder.
“A girl wants to feel some pride in the man she’s going to marry. It’s horrible to have to be always defending him—especially when she’s not sure she’s telling the truth in his defence.”