Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/182

174 were able to tell me that. What do they think a man is made of? What does she think?'

A little embarrassed, Margaret looked round her, wishing to show she could be kind and patient, yet making no movement to sit down. Mrs. Gorton's allusion was still in the air—it had just affected their common comfort. 'I know what you mean. You assume she tells me everything.'

'I assume that you're her most intimate friend. I don't know to whom else to turn.'

The face the girl now took in was smooth-shaven and fine, a face expressing penetration up to the limit of decorum. It was full of the man's profession—passionately legal. Barton Reeve was certainly concerned with advice, but not with taking it. 'What particular thing,' she asked, 'do you want me to do?'

'Well, to make her see what she's doing to me. From you she'll take it. She won't take it from me. She doesn't believe me—she thinks I'm "prejudiced." But she'll believe you.'

Miss Hamer smiled, but not with cruelty. 'And whom shall I believe?'

'Ah, that's not kind of you!' Barton Reeve returned; after which, for a moment, as he stood there sombre and sensitive, something visibly came to him that completed his thought, but that he hesitated to produce. Presently, as if to keep it back, he turned away with a jerk. He knew all about the girl herself—the woman of whom they talked had, out of the fulness of her own knowledge, told him; he knew what would have given him a right to say: 'Oh, come; don't pretend I've to reveal to you what the dire thing makes of us!' He moved across the room and came back—felt himself even at this very moment, in the grip of his passion, shaken as a rat by a terrier. But just that was what he showed by his silence. As he rejoined her by the chimney-piece he was extravagantly nervous. 'Oh Lord, Lord!' he at last simply exclaimed.