Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/192

184 'She hasn't explained to me anything—I don't need it,' said the girl, with some spirit. 'I've only explained to her.'

'Well?'—he was almost peremptory.

She didn't mind it. 'Well, her excuse—for her false position, I mean—is really a perfectly good one.' Miss Hamer had been standing, but with this she walked on. 'She found she—what do you call it?—liked you.'

'Then what's the matter?'

'Why, that she didn't know how much you'd like her, how far you'd—what do you call it?—"go." It's odious to be talking of such things, I think,' she pursued; 'and I assure you I wouldn't do it for other people—for any one but you and her. It makes it all sound so vulgar. She didn't think you cared—on the contrary. Then when she began to see, she had got in too deep.'

'She had made my life impossible to me without her? She certainly has "got in" to that extent,' said Barton Reeve, 'and it's precisely my contention. Can you pretend for her that to have found out that she has done this leaves open to her, in common decency, any but the one course?'

'I don't pretend anything!' his companion replied with some confusion and still more impatience. 'I'm bound to say I don't see what responsibility you're trying to fix on me.'

He just cast about him, making little wild jerks with his stick. 'I'm not trying anything and you're awfully good to me. I dare say my predicament makes me a shocking bore—makes me, in fact, ridiculous. But I don't speak to you only because you're her friend—her friend, and therefore not indifferent to the benefit for her of what, take it altogether, I have to offer. It's because I feel so sure of how, in her place, you would generously, admirably take your own line.'

'Heaven forbid I should ever be in her place!' Margaret exclaimed with a laugh in which it pleased Reeve, at the moment, to discover a world of dissimulation.

'You're already there—I say, come!' the young man had