"
".Yes, they do worry me," said Nora, densely.
They worry me night and day when he is away from
me."
" Oh," responded Marjory, " I have never thought
of Mr. Coleman as a man that one would worry about
much. We consider him very self-reliant, able to take
care of himself under almost any conditions, but then,
of course, we do not know him at all in the way that
you know him. I should think that you would find
that he came off rather better than you expected from
most of his difficulties. But then, of course, as. I said,
you know him so much better than we do." Her
easy indifference was a tacit dismissal of Coleman as
a topic.
Nora, now thoroughly alert, glanced keenly into the
other girl's face, but it was inscrutable. The actress
had intended to go careering through a whole circle
of daring illusions to an intimacy with,Coleman, but
here, before she had really developed her attack,
Marjory, with a few conventional and indifferent
sentences, almost expressive of boredom, had made
the subject of Coleman impossible. An effect was left
upon Nora's mind that Marjory had been extremely
polite in listening to much nervous talk about a person
in whom she had no interest.
The actress was dazed. She did not know how it
had all been done. Where was the head of this thing?
And where Was the tail? A fog had mysteriously
come upon all her brilliant prospects of seeing Marjory
Wainwright suffer, and this fog was the product of
a kind of magic with which she was not familiar.
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