My father’s all right, but he couldn’t do what my uncle could and he wouldn’t.
You don’t know or you wouldn’t ask me to do this.”
He paused, his face a picture of puzzled fear and opposition.
He was not unlike a harried animal, deftly pursued by hunter and hound.
But Roberta, imagining that his total defection had been caused by the social side of Lycurgus as opposed to her own low state and not because of the superior lure of any particular girl, now retorted resentfully, although she desired not to appear so:
“Oh, yes, I know well enough why you can’t leave.
It isn’t your position here, though, half as much as it is those society people you are always running around with.
I know.
You don’t care for me any more, Clyde, that’s it, and you don’t want to give these other people up for me.
I know that’s it and nothing else.
But just the same it wasn’t so very long ago that you did, although you don’t seem to remember it now.”
Her cheeks burned and her eyes flamed as she said this.
She paused a moment while he gazed at her wondering about the outcome of all this.
“But you can’t leave me to make out any way I can, just the same, because I won’t be left this way, Clyde.
I can’t!
I can’t! I tell you.”
She grew tense and staccato,
“It means too much to me.
I don’t know how to do alone and I, besides, have no one to turn to but you and you must help me.
I’ve got to get out of this, that’s all, Clyde, I’ve got to.
I’m not going to be left to face my people and everybody without any help or marriage or anything.”
As she said this, her eyes turned appealingly and yet savagely toward him and she emphasized it all with her hands, which she clinched and unclinched in a dramatic way.
“And if you can’t help me out in the way you thought,” she went on most agonizedly as Clyde could see, “then you’ve got to help me out in this other, that’s all. At least until I can do for myself I just won’t be left.
I don’t ask you to marry me forever,” she now added, the thought that if by presenting this demand in some modified form, she could induce Clyde to marry her, it might be possible afterwards that his feeling toward her would change to a much more kindly one.
“You can leave me after a while if you want to.
After I’m out of this.
I can’t prevent you from doing that and I wouldn’t want to if I could.
But you can’t leave me now.
You can’t. You can’t!
Besides,” she added, “I didn’t want to get myself in this position and I wouldn’t have, but for you.
But you made me and made me let you come in here.
And now you want to leave me to shift for myself, just because you think you won’t be able to go in society any more, if they find out about me.”
She paused, the strain of this contest proving almost too much for her tired nerves.
At the same time she began to sob nervously and yet not violently — a marked effort at self-restraint and recovery marking her every gesture.
And after a moment or two in which both stood there, he gazing dumbly and wondering what else he was to say in answer to all this, she struggling and finally managing to recover her poise, she added:
“Oh, what is it about me that’s so different to what I was a couple of months ago, Clyde?
Will you tell me that? I’d like to know. What is it that has caused you to change so?
Up to Christmas, almost, you were as nice to me as any human being could be.
You were with me nearly all the time you had, and since then I’ve scarcely had an evening that I didn’t beg for.
Who is it?
What is it?
Some other girl, or what, I’d like to know — that Sondra Finchley or Bertine Cranston, or who?”
Her eyes as she said this were a study.
For even to this hour, as Clyde could now see to his satisfaction, since he feared the effect on Roberta of definite and absolute knowledge concerning Sondra, she had no specific suspicion, let alone positive knowledge concerning any girl.
And coward-wise, in the face of her present predicament and her assumed and threatened claims on him, he was afraid to say what or who the real cause of this change was.
Instead he merely replied and almost unmoved by her sorrow, since he no longer really cared for her:
“Oh, you’re all wrong, Bert.
You don’t see what the trouble is.
It’s my future here — if I leave here I certainly will never find such an opportunity.
And if I have to marry in this way or leave here it will all go flooey.