"What do you mean by that?"
"Nothing I care to explain, except I discovered my love for you was dead—perhaps had been dead for a long time."
"But you never discovered it until you saw me—here—with Swann—dancing, drinking, smoking?"
"No. To be honest, the shock of that enlightened me."
"Daren Lane, I'm just what you men have made me," she burst out, passionately.
"You are mistaken. I beg to be excluded from any complicity in the—in whatever you've been made," he said, bitterly. "I have been true to you in deed and in thought all this time."
"You must be a queer soldier!" she exclaimed, incredulously.
"I figure there were a couple of million soldiers like me, queer or not," he retorted.
She gazed at him with something akin to hate in her eyes. Then putting her hands to her full hips she began that swaying, dancing walk to and fro before the window. She was deeply hurt. Lane had meant to get under her skin with a few just words of scorn, and he had imagined his insinuation as to the change in her had hurt her feelings. Suddenly he divined it was not that at all—he had only wounded her vanity.
"Helen, let's not talk of the past," he said. "It's over. Even if you had been true to me, and I loved you still—I would have been compelled to break our engagement."