g
for her restored him for the moment to reality; he bent over her. "I've
never wanted to hurry you, dearest---- It shall be when you say." She
put up her hands suddenly with a shivering movement.

"Oh, never, never at all; never to you!"

Peter could feel that working its track of desolation inward, but the
first instinctive movement of his surface was to close over the wound.
He took it as he knew he could only take it: as the explosive crisis of
the virginal resistance which he remembered he had heard came to girls
when marriage loomed upon them. He took a turn down the room to steady
himself, praying dumbly for the right word.

"It isn't as if I didn't respect you"--she was eager in explanation,
hurried and stumbling--"as if I didn't know how good you are ... it is
only, because we are so different."

"How different, Eunice?"

"Oh ... older, I suppose." She grew quieter; it appeared on the whole
they were getting on. "I care for so many things, you know--dancing--and
bridge--_young_ things--and you are always reading and reading. Oh! I
couldn't stand it."

So it was out now. She was jealous of his books, a little. Well, he had
been self-absorbed. It occurred to him dimly that the thing to have done
if he had known a little more about women, had practised with them, was
to have provoked her at this point to the tears which should have sealed
the renewal of his claim to her. What he said was, very quietly:

"Of course I never meant, Eunice, that you shouldn't have everything you
want."

"Oh," she seemed to have found a suffocating quality in his gentleness,
against which she struck out with drowning gestures, "if you could only
understand what it would mean to me never to have anybody I liked to
talk to about things,--anybody I liked to be with all the time!" She was
choked and aghast at the enormity of it.

"But I thought...." Peter was not able to go on with that. "Isn't there
anybody you like to be with, Eunice?"

"Yes," said Eunice. "Burton Henderson."

Mutinous and bright she looked at him out of the chair with a hand on
either arm of it poised for flight or defence. After an interval Peter
heard his own voice out of a fog rising to the conventional utterance.

"Of course, if you have learned to love him----"

"I've loved him all the time." She was so bent on making this clear to
him that she was careless what went down before her. "From the very
beginning," she said, "but he had so little money