She did her best to control the wave of feeling that made her draw free of him.
“She doesn’t feel so, Neil, or think you do. She loves you; and said it tonight too definitely to make me feel you have not returned in kind. Neil, where are our promises?”
“My God, Sydney, since when were you such an innocent as to think promises were anything more than baubles, pretty but—but vain. The promises to love forever until death do us part—”
“Keep still, Neil! You know as well as I do that those aren’t the promises I am thinking of. Besides, we never made those particular promises. But we did promise we weren’t going to go living around with other people unless we _meant_ it—meant it down to the ground, do you hear me?” She was trying to keep her voice under control, but it would rise spasmodically. “And here you seem to have done just that.”
“I wasn’t just living around, Sydney. You know me well enough to know I’d be fastidious about such things. Romany and I got into it somehow, quite naturally. Why can’t women realize how little such things mean to a man, and to some women. She’s one of them. We’ve never spoken of love; do you hear that?”
“Neil, how silly to say such a thing, when by its very nature love is somehow involved. In the very essence of it—your winnowing of the physical from the spiritual—it is the ruin of all idealism. Someone we know, who was it, was saying the other day that the trouble with the younger generation is that it lacks guts. You are exactly what he meant, Neil.”
“Don’t be vulgar about it, Sydney. Vulgarity doesn’t suit you. Only the sophisticated can get away with it. Your delicacy is one of the reasons I care for you. And I _do_ care. You can’t say I don’t love you, or you me. Can you say it?”
“Which only makes it frightfully much worse. And don’t lie to me. She couldn’t have written you a letter like that if you hadn’t used love, in one form or another, toward her. Don’t quibble about the meaning of the word love.”
“I saw a letter on your desk, Neil. I had to read it, you can see that.”
“Then you got just what was coming to you, Sydney. Even a wife, a wife least of all, doesn’t read a man’s private correspondence unless she wants to get hurt.”
“All right! Say it if you will. It can’t make matters any more terrible than they are. I saw the address on the envelope (I knew she had been in Hollywood this spring), and in a flash I remembered that—that night. It’s asking too much of human nature to ask it to turn its back on the truth at such a moment. And you can’t say it isn’t better to know the truth at whatever cost to us both.”