so easy if they had had to take not their lives but most of
their most secret and painful inwards and put them down on a tea-table
like a new species of currant bun under the eyes of a friendly
acquaintance to help their real friends.

"I can't tell you how awfully decent it was of you and Peter," he began
finally after regarding a buttered muffin for several minutes as if it
were part of the funeral decorations for dead young love. "Asking me out
here, just now. Oh I'll write you a charming bread-and-butter letter
of course--but I wanted to tell you really--" He stopped and let the
sentence hang with malice aforethought. Elinor's move. Trust Elinor.
And the trust was justified for she answered as he wanted her to, and at
once.

"Why Ollie, as if it was anything--when we've all of us more or less
grown up together, haven't we--and you and Peter--" She stopped--oh
what was the use of being tactful! "I suppose it sounds--put
on--and--sentimental and all that--saying it," she laughed nervously,
"but we--all of us--Peter and myself--we're so really _sorry_--if
you'll believe us--only it was hard to know if you wanted to have us say
so--how awfully sorry we were. And then asking you out here with this
howling mob doesn't seem much like it, does it? but Peter was going
to be here--and Ted--and I knew what friends you'd been in college--I
thought maybe--but I just didn't want you to think it was because we
didn't care--"

"I know--and--and--thanks--and I do appreciate, Elinor." Oliver noticed
with some slight terror that his own voice seemed to be getting a little
out of control. But what she had just said took away his last doubt as
to whether she was really the kind of person Ted ought to marry--and in
spite of feeling as if he were trapping her into a surgical operation
she knew nothing about, he kept on.

"It gets pretty bad, sometimes," he said simply and waited. Last
night--if things came out right later--will have been just what Elinor
needed most, he decided privately. She had always struck him as being a
little too aloof to be quite human--but she was changing under his eyes
to a very human variety of worried young girl.

"Well, isn't there something we can really _do_?" she said diffidently,
then changing,

"Oh I mean it--if you don't think it's only--probing--asking that?" as
she changed again.

"Not a thing I'm afraid, Elinor, though I really do thank you." He hated
his voice--it sounded so brave. "It's j