“But you must love her, or you couldn’t—you wouldn’t—” A burning flush scorched Margaret’s body.
“I never said that I....” Even with her he had always treated the word love as if it were a dangerous explosive, and he avoided touching it now, “that I cared for her in that way.”
He glanced about like a trapped animal. “I am not a fool, am I? Why, I am old enough to be her father! Besides, I am not the only one anyway. She was living with a man when I met her, and he wasn’t the first. She isn’t bad, you know. It’s a kind of philosophy with her. She calls it self....”
“I know.” Margaret cut the phrase short. “I have heard what she calls it.” So it was all wasted! Nothing that she could do could lift the situation above the level of the commonplace, the merely vulgar. She was defrauded not only of happiness, but even of the opportunity to be generous. Her sacrifice was as futile as that girl’s passion. “But she is in love with you now,” she said.
“I suppose she is.” His tone had grown stubborn. “But how long would it last? In six months she would be leaving me for somebody else. Of course, I won’t see her again,” he added, with the manner of one who is conceding a reasonable point. Then, after a pause in which she made no response, his stubbornness changed into resentment. “Anybody would think that you are angry because I am not in love with her!” he exclaimed. “Anybody would think—but I don’t understand women!”
“Then you will not—you do not mean to leave me?” she asked; and her manner was as impersonal, she was aware, as if Winters had just given her notice.
“Leave you?” He glanced appreciatively round the room. “Where on earth could I go?”
For an instant Margaret looked at him in silence. Then she insisted coldly, “To her, perhaps. She thinks that you are in love with her.”
“Well, I suppose I’ve been a fool,” he confessed, after a struggle, “but you are making too much of it.”
Yes, she was making too much of it; she realized this more poignantly than he would ever be able to do. She felt like an actress who has endowed a comic part with the gesture of high tragedy. It was not, she saw clearly now, that she had misunderstood George, but that she had overplayed life.
“We met last summer at Ogunquit.” She became aware presently that he was still making excuses and explanations about nothing. “You couldn’t go about much, you know, and we went swimming and played golf together. I liked her, and I could see that she liked me. When we came away I thought we’d break it off, but somehow we didn’t. I saw her several times in New York. Then she came here unexpectedly, and I offered her that old villa nobody would rent. You don’t understand such things, Margaret. It hadn’t any more to do with you than—than—” He hesitated, fished in the stagnant waters of his mind, and flung out abruptly, “than golf has. It was just a sort of—well, sort of—recreation.”