She looked at him strangely, her lips working in the shadow of her old smile of mockery.
“That proves to me that it is your name and not yourself that is dishonoured. If it had been yourself, you would not have forgotten.”
Jimmie drew himself up, and there was a touch of haughtiness in his manner that Norma in her woman's way noted swiftly. In spite of his homeliness there was the undefinable spirit of the great gentleman in Jimmie.
“I am dishonoured. The matter was public property. I discuss it with no one, least of all with you.”
“Very well,” she said. “Let it never be mentioned again between us. I range myself with Aline. I shall believe what I like. You can't prevent my doing that, can you? I choose to believe you are the one thing God made in which I can find happiness. That's enough for me, and it ought to be enough for you.”
Jimmie put his hand on her shoulder, deeply moved.
“My dearest, you must n't say things like that.” He repeated the words, “You mustn't say things like that.” Then he was conscious of the warm softness on which his hand rested. She raised her arm and touched his fingers. It was a moment of deep temptation. He resisted, drew his hand away gently.
“There is another reason why it cannot be,” he said. “You belong to a world of wealth and luxury, I have been in poverty all my life. God forbid I should complain. I have never done so. But it is a life of struggle for daily bread. Aline and I are used to it. We laugh. We often dine with Duke Humphrey. We make believe like the marchioness. What the discipline of life and a sort of gipsy faith in Providence have made us regard as a jest, would be to you a sordid shift, an intolerable ugliness stripping life of its beauty—”
“Oh, hush!” she pleaded.
“No, I must talk and you must listen,” he said with a certain masterful dignity. “Look at you now, in the exquisite loveliness of your dress, with that diamond star in your hair, with that queenly presence of yours. Do you fit in with all this? Your place is in great houses, among historic pictures, rare carpets, furniture that is invested with the charm of an artist's touch. The chair you are sitting in—the leather is split and the springs are broken.” He was walking now backwards and forwards across the studio, fulfilling his task bravely, scarcely trusting himself to look at her. “Your place,” he continued, “is among the great ones of the earth—princes, ambassadors, men of genius. Here are but the little folk: even should they come, as they used to do: homely men with rough ways and their wives—sweet simple women with a baby and a frock a year, God help them! I can't ask you to share this life with me, my dear. I should be a scoundrel if I did. As it is, I have fallen below myself in letting you know that I love you. You must forgive me. A man is, after all, a man, whether he be beggar or prince. You must go back into your world and forget it all. The passion-flower cannot thrive in the hedge with the dog-rose, my dearest. It will pine and fade. We must end it all. Don't you see? You don't know what poverty means. Even decent poverty like ours. Look—the men you know have valets to dress them—when you came Aline was sewing new cuffs on my shirts. I don't suppose you ever knew that such things were done. Mere existence is a matter of ever anxious detail. I am a careless fellow, I am a selfish brute, like most men, and give over to the women folk around me the thousand harassing considerations of ways and means for every day in every year. But I see more than they think. Aline can tell you. I dare n't, my dear, ask you to share this life with me. I dare n't, I dare n't.”