FullReads

“We were at school together, and we shared the same rooms in Harvard.”

“He is very sincere,” she added, as if this were relevant.

“He’s a man who likes to have a little worse than the worst known about him. One might say he was excessively sincere.” Enderby divined that Alford had been bungling the matter, and he was willing to help him out if he could.

Mrs. Yarrow fixed dimly beautiful eyes upon him. “I don’t know,” she said, “why it wouldn’t be ideal–as much ideal as anything–to give one’s self absolutely to–to–a duty–or not duty, exactly; I don’t mean that. Especially,” she added, showing a light through the mist, “if one wanted to do it.”

Then he knew she had made up her mind, and though on some accounts he would have liked to laugh with her, on other accounts he felt that he owed it to her to be serious.

“If women could not fulfil the ideal in that way–if they did not constantly do it–there would be no marriages for love.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, with a shaking voice. “But men–men are ideal, too.”

“Not as women are–except now and then some fool like Alford.” Now, indeed, he laughed, and he began to praise Alford from his heart, so delicately, so tenderly, so reverently, that Mrs. Yarrow laughed too before he was done, and cried a little, and when she rose to leave she could not speak; but clung to his hand, on turning away, and so flung it from behind her with a gesture that Enderby thought pretty.

At this point, Wanhope stopped as if that were the end.

“And did she let Alford come to see her again?” Rulledge, at once romantic and literal, demanded.

“Oh yes. At any rate, they were married that fall. They are–I believe he’s pursuing his archaeological studies there–living in Athens.”

“Together?” Minver smoothly inquired.

At this expression of cynicism Rulledge gave him a look that would have incinerated another. Wanhope went out with Minver, and then, after a moment’s daze, Rulledge exclaimed: “Jove! I forgot to ask him whether it’s stopped Alford’s illusions!”