THE AMATEUR LOVER
tremes of temperament. I've tried to remember always that he did n't grow up here with us in our little town with all our fierce, little-town standards, but that he was educated abroad, that his whole moral, mental, and social ideals are different, that the admiration and adulation of new women is like the breath of life to him that he simply could n't live without it any more than I could live without the love of animals, or the friendship of children, or the wonderfulness of outdoors, all of which bore him to distraction.
"Oh, I've reasoned it all out, night after night after night, fought it out, torn it out, that he prob ably really and truly did love me quite a good deal in his own way when there was n't anything else to do. But how can it possibly content a woman to have a man love her as well as he knows how - if it is n't as well as she knows how? We won't talk about Aleck Reese's morals," she finished abruptly. "Fickleness, selfishness, neglect, even in fidelity itself, are such purely minor, incidental data of the one big, incurably rotten and distasteful fact that such and such a man is stupid in the affec tions.
With growing weakness she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes.
For an anxious moment Drew sat and watched
her. "Is that all?" he asked at last.
207
