For just a moment she had an illuminating flash of Wilson as he really was, selfish and self-indulgent, just a trifle too carefully dressed, daring as to eye and speech, with a carefully calculated daring, frankly pleasure-loving. She put her hands over her eyes.
The voices in the next room had risen above their whisper.
“Genius has privileges, of course,” said the older voice. “He is a very great surgeon. Tomorrow he is to do the Edwardes operation again. I am glad I am to see him do it.”
Sidney still held her hands over her eyes. He WAS a great surgeon: in his hands he held the keys of life and death. And perhaps he had never cared for Carlotta: she might have thrown herself at him. He was a man, at the mercy of any scheming woman.
She tried to summon his image to her aid. But a curious thing happened. She could not visualize him. Instead, there came, clear and distinct, a picture of K. Le Moyne in the hall of the little house, reaching one of his long arms to the chandelier over his head and looking up at her as she stood on the stairs.
CHAPTER XXII
“My God, Sidney, I’m asking you to marry me!”
“I—I know that. I am asking you something else, Max.”
“I have never been in love with her.”
His voice was sulky. He had drawn the car close to a bank, and they were sitting in the shade, on the grass. It was the Sunday afternoon after Sidney’s experience in the operating-room.
“You took her out, Max, didn’t you?”
“A few times, yes. She seemed to have no friends. I was sorry for her.”
“That was all?”
“Absolutely. Good Heavens, you’ve put me through a catechism in the last ten minutes!”
“If my father were living, or even mother, I—one of them would have done this for me, Max. I’m sorry I had to. I’ve been very wretched for several days.”
It was the first encouragement she had given him. There was no coquetry about her aloofness. It was only that her faith in him had had a shock and was slow of reviving.
“You are very, very lovely, Sidney. I wonder if you have any idea what you mean to me?”
“You meant a great deal to me, too,” she said frankly, “until a few days ago. I thought you were the greatest man I had ever known, and the best. And then—I think I’d better tell you what I overheard. I didn’t try to hear. It just happened that way.”
He listened doggedly to her account of the hospital gossip, doggedly and with a sinking sense of fear, not of the talk, but of Carlotta herself. Usually one might count on the woman’s silence, her instinct for self-protection. But Carlotta was different. Damn the girl, anyhow! She had known from the start that the affair was a temporary one; he had never pretended anything else.
There was silence for a moment after Sidney finished. Then:
“You are not a child any longer, Sidney. You have learned a great deal in this last year. One of the things you know is that almost every man has small affairs, many of them sometimes, before he finds the woman he wants to marry. When he finds her, the others are all off—there’s nothing to them. It’s the real thing then, instead of the sham.”
“Palmer was very much in love with Christine, and yet—”
“Palmer is a cad.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m making terms. I’m not. But if this thing went on, and I found out afterward that you—that there was anyone else, it would kill me.”
“Then you care, after all!”
There was something boyish in his triumph, in the very gesture with which he held out his arms, like a child who has escaped a whipping. He stood up and, catching her hands, drew her to her feet. “You love me, dear.”
“I’m afraid I do, Max.”
“Then I’m yours, and only yours, if you want me,” he said, and took her in his arms.
He was riotously happy, must hold her off for the joy of drawing her to him again, must pull off her gloves and kiss her soft bare palms.
“I love you, love you!” he cried, and bent down to bury his face in the warm hollow of her neck.
Sidney glowed under his caresses—was rather startled at his passion, a little ashamed.
“Tell me you love me a little bit. Say it.”
“I love you,” said Sidney, and flushed scarlet.
But even in his arms, with the warm sunlight on his radiant face, with his lips to her ear, whispering the divine absurdities of passion, in the back of her obstinate little head was the thought that, while she had given him her first embrace, he had held other women in his arms. It made her passive, prevented her complete surrender.
And after a time he resented it. “You are only letting me love you,” he complained. “I don’t believe you care, after all.”
He freed her, took a step back from her.
“I am afraid I am jealous,” she said simply. “I keep thinking of—of Carlotta.”
“Will it help any if I swear that that is off absolutely?”
