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Drumley ordered the sort of dinner she liked, and a bottle of champagne and a bottle of fine burgundy to make his favorite drink champagne and burgundy, half and half. He was running to poetry that evening Keats and Swinburne. Finally, after some hesitation, he produced a poem by Dowson "I ran across it today.
"I suppose you read the sort of stuff you really like, now not the things you used to read to make old Drumley think you were cultured and intellectual." "No the same sort," replied she, unruffled by his contemptuous, unjust fling. "Trash bores me." "Come to think of it, I guess you did have pretty good taste in books."
Whenever Drumley heard that a woman other than the brazenly out and out disreputables was "loose" or was inclined that way, he indignantly denied it as a libel upon the empedestaled sex. If proofs beyond dispute were furnished, he raved against the man with all the venom of the unsuccessful hating the successful for their success.
Drumley was a good sort not so much through positive virtue as through the timidity which too often accounts for goodness, that is, for the meek conformity which passes as goodness.
She had early learned to ignore his moods, to avoid sympathy which aggravates, and to meet his blues with a vigorous counterirritant of liveliness. After watching the course of this acute attack for more than a month, she decided that at the first opportunity she would try to find out from Drumley what the cause was. Perhaps she could cure him if she were not working in the dark.
Drumley fell in love with her; but, as in his experience the female sex was coldly chaste, he never developed even the slight hope necessary to start in a man's mind the idea of treachery to his friend about a woman.
The reply was the truth, as she saw the truth. Perhaps it was also the absolute truth; for when a woman has the best she has ever actually possessed, and when she knows there is nowhere else on earth for her, she is likely to be content. Their destiny of subordination has made philosophers of women. Drumley seemed to be debating how to disclose something he had in mind.
If Susan had been of the suspicious temperament, or if she had been a few years older, the manner of this second protest might have set her to thinking how unlike Drumley, the inexpert in matters of love and passion, it was to analyze thus and to form such judgments.
"Tell me, Susan, did you leave me in Forty-fourth Street because you thought or heard I wasn't true to you?" "What did Drumley tell you?" "I asked him, as you said in your note. He told me he knew no reason." So Drumley had decided it was best Rod should not know why she left. Well, perhaps probably Drumley was right. But there was no reason why he shouldn't know the truth now.
From his first words she had been prey to an internal struggle her heart fighting against understanding things about her relations with Rod, about his feeling toward her, which she had long been contriving to hide from herself. When Drumley began she knew that the end of self-deception was at hand if she let him speak. But the instant he had spoken, the struggle ended.
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