“Ah, I don’t know!” Bernard exclaimed.
“I am sure of it,” said Gordon earnestly—almost argumentatively. “She ‘s an extraordinary woman.”
“Keeping you good friends with me—that ‘s a great thing. But it ‘s nothing to her keeping you good friends with your wife.”
Gordon looked at Bernard for an instant; then he fixed his eyes for some time on the fire.
“Yes, that is the greatest of all things. A man should value his wife. He should believe in her. He has taken her, and he should keep her—especially when there is a great deal of good in her. I was a great fool the other day,” he went on. “I don’t remember what I said. It was very weak.”
“It seemed to me feeble,” said Bernard. “But it is quite within a man’s rights to be a fool once in a while, and you had never abused of the license.”
“Well, I have done it for a lifetime—for a lifetime.” And Gordon took up his hat. He looked into the crown of it for a moment, and then he fixed his eyes on Bernard’s again. “But there is one thing I hope you won’t mind my saying. I have come back to my old impression of Miss Vivian.”
“Your old impression?”
And Miss Vivian’s accepted lover frowned a little.
“I mean that she ‘s not simple. She ‘s very strange.”