Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/306

298 She quite accepted that precaution. 'No—to nobody. He doesn't. He keeps it only for me.'

'Conferring on you thus,' I again laughed, 'such a precious privilege!'

She was silent a moment, looking away from me. 'Well, he has kept his vow.'

'You mean of not marrying? Are you very sure?' I asked. 'Didn't he perhaps?' But I faltered at the boldness of my joke.

The next moment I saw I needn't. 'He was in love with her,' Lavinia brought out.

I broke now into a peal which, however provoked, struck even my own ear at the moment as rude almost to profanity. 'He literally tells you outright that he's making believe?'

She met me effectively enough. 'I don't think he knows he is. He's just completely in the current.'

'The current of the old people's twaddle?'

Again my companion hesitated; but she knew what she thought. 'Well, whatever we call it, I like it. It isn't so common, as the world goes, for any one—let alone for two or three—to feel and to care for the dead as much as that. It's self-deception, no doubt, but it comes from something that—well,' she faltered again, 'is beautiful when one does hear of it. They make her out older, so as to imagine they had her longer; and they make out that certain things really happened to her, so that she shall have had more life. They've invented a whole experience for her, and Marmaduke has become a part of it. There's one thing, above all, they want her to have had.' My young friend's face, as she analysed the mystery, fairly grew bright with her vision. It came to me with a faint dawn of awe that the attitude of the Dedricks was contagious. 'And she did have it!' Lavinia declared.

I positively admired her, and if I could yet perfectly be rational without being ridiculous, it was really, more than anything else, to draw from her the whole image. 'She had