FLAMING
YOUTH
263
- You’d do a dishonourable thing, a thing you consider
dishonourable, to be free?” she asked. “To marry you,” he said doggedly. “Yes. There’s
nothing I’d.stop at.”
‘4
She gave her little, delighted crow. “I believe you wouldn’t. But I’m not going to let you.” “You can’t prevent me.”
- T wouldn’t marry you if you did.”
His brows took on their ironic lift. ‘That is heroics, Pat; motion picture heroics. “To save the other woman.’ ” Pat pouted. “It’s misplaced nobility, my dear. She isn’t entitled to it. She doesn’t care for me. You do.” “Not enough to marry you, though. Not enough to be sure. It’s all so puzzling, Cary.” Her deep, soft voice shook. “I—I don’t understand myself. But I’m just not sure.
Is that terrible of me, dear, not to want to
marry your” “Don’t you love me, Pat?” he asked, incredulous of the doubt itself. “TI suppose I do, now. If it would only last, like this.” “But it can’t go on like this,” he cried hoarsely. “Why can’t it?? she murmured protestingly. The eternal feminine within her, eternally static, eternally con~ servative, eternally fatalistic where its own interests are concerned, was asserting itself. Better the thing as it is, however precarious, than a step in the dark.
Change,
to a woman’s apprehension, is a challenge to the unknown, “Surely you must know. Surely you must realize the constant risk, the constant danger ” “Of being found out? I’m not afraid for myself. You know, Cary, dear, I never can quite believe in danger until it comes. I suppose I ought to. I suppose I ought to feel different in lots of ways. Yet I don’t feel different. Not really. Tell me why, Cary.”
