Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/351

"Indiscretion? Oh———" She shrugged the word away with half a smile, as though such considerations belonged to a prehistoric order of things. "Then he hasn't even told you that he wants me to get a divorce?"

"A divorce?" Campton exclaimed. He sat staring at her as if the weight of his gaze might pin her down, keep her from fluttering away and breaking up into luminous splinters. George wanted her to get a divorce—wanted, therefore, to marry her! His passion went as deep for her as that—too deep, Campton conjectured, for the poor little ephemeral creature, who struck him as wriggling on it like a butterfly impaled.

"Please tell me," he said at length; and suddenly, in short inconsequent sentences, the confession poured from her.

George, it seemed, during the previous winter in New York, when they had seen so much of each other, had been deeply attracted, had wanted "everything," and at once—and there had been moments of tension and estrangement, when she had been held back by scruples she confessed she no longer understood (inherited prejudices, she supposed), and when her reluctance must have made her appear to be trifling, whereas, really it was just that she couldn't. . . couldn't. . . So they had gone on for several months, with the usual emotional ups-and-downs, till he had left for Europe to join his father; and when they had