take Marjorie away from that place and the companions to whom she clung.
Probably she would like her father to come and beg her to go, Hale thought; and he recalled, with a wince, her, "Don't touch me, father." Well, what might she have for him now?
He shaved himself unsatisfactorily, but he finished with it and came back into the bedroom and started gathering up his clothes.
"'Also.'" That had been cast in his face by Whittaker. "'The man, who also passed himself as her husband, picked up somebody else.'" That bit sharper than Whittaker guessed; or did Billy guess? Probably not; almost surely not; what Whittaker meant was that a man had passed as that girl's husband as Hale had passed as Sybil Russell's. But there was more to guess and Hale was feeling the drag of it; Sybil Russell was trying to make herself more to him than she could be.
She was not asking him to make her his wife, in a legal, recognized way; always—or at least ever since he met her—she had spoken fine scorn for the bonds by law; and she was too clever, if she was not too consistent, to ask those bonds now. But she was forever endeavoring to make herself his companion more constantly, more completely to fill the place of his wife; and there was something about it which offended Hale unreasonably; he didn't try to think it out; it was enough that sometimes a thing she said or did—an assumption of equality with his wife or with his daughter—set his teeth on edge. She never once criticized either of them; oh, she was not stupid; she simply assumed to love him too much. And though they avoided meeting on Clearedge Street, yet to be with her
