Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/121

Rh Chilver met her as he could. 'You evidently can't have given any one very many!'

'Oh, you know,' she replied, 'I don't in the least regard it as a matter of course that, many or few, they should be eagerly seized. Mr. Braddle has only behaved as almost any man in his situation would have done.'

Chilver at first, on this, only lost himself awhile. 'Yes, almost any man. I don't consider that the smallest blame attaches to him.'

'It would be too monstrous.'

Again he was briefly silent, but he had his inspiration. 'Yes, let us speak of him gently.' Then he added: 'You've answered me enough. You're free.'

'Free indeed is what I feel,' she replied with her light irony, 'when I talk to you with this extraordinary frankness.'

'Ah, the frankness is mine! It comes from the fact that from the first, through Braddle, I knew. And you knew I knew. And I knew that too. It has made something between us.'

'It might have made something rather different from this,' said Mrs. Damerel.

He wondered an instant. 'Different from my sitting here so intimately with you?'

'I mightn't have been able to bear that. I might have hated the sight of you.'

'Ah, that would have been only,' said Chilver, 'if you had really liked me!'

She matched quickly enough the spirit of this. 'Oh, but it wasn't so easy to like you little enough!'

'Little enough to endure me? Well, thank heaven, at any rate, we've found a sort of way!' Then he went on with real sincerity: 'I feel as if our friend had tremendously helped me. Oh, how easily I want to let him down! There it is.'

She breathed, after a moment, her assent in a sigh. 'There it is!'