Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/183

Rh 'I believe you—I believe you,' she replied. 'But she really does too.'

'Then why does she treat me so?—it's a refinement of perversity and cruelty. She never gives me an inch but she takes back the next day ten yards; never shows me a gleam of sincerity without making up for it as soon as possible by something that leaves me in no doubt of her absolute heartless coquetry. Of whom the deuce is she afraid?'

His companion hesitated. 'You perhaps might remember once in a while that she has a husband.'

'Do I ever forget it for an instant? Isn't my life one long appeal to her to get rid of him?'

'Ah,' said his friend as if she knew all about it, 'getting rid of husbands isn't so easy!'

'I beg your pardon'—Reeve spoke with much more gravity and a still greater competence—'there's every facility for it when the man's a proved brute and the woman an angel whom, for three years, he has not troubled himself so much as to look at.'

'Do you think,' Miss Hamer inquired, 'that, even for an angel, extreme intimacy with another angel—such another as you: angels of a feather flock together!—positively adds to the facility?'

Barton could perfectly meet her. 'It adds to the reason—that's what it adds to; and the reason is the facility. I only know one way,' he went on, 'of showing her I want to marry her. I can't show it by never going near her.'

'But need you also show Colonel Despard?'

'Colonel Despard doesn't care a rap!'

'He cares enough to have given her all this time nothing whatever—for divorcing him, if you mean that—to take hold of.'

'I do mean that,' Barton Reeve declared; 'and I must ask you to believe that I know what I'm talking about. He hates her enough for any perversity, but he has given her exactly what is necessary. Enough's as good as a feast!'