She couldn't even make him happy, much less herself.
Monohan--well, Monohan was a dead issue. He had come to the Charteris to
see her, all smiles and eagerness. She had been able to look at him and
through him--and cut him dead--and do it without a single flutter of her
heart.
That brief and illuminating episode in Wain's had merely confirmed an
impression that had slowly grown upon her, and her outburst of feeling
that night had only been the overflowing of shamed anger at herself for
letting his magnetic personality make so deep an impression on her that
she could admit to him that she cared. She felt that she had belittled
herself by that. But he was no longer a problem. She wondered now how he
ever could have been. She recalled that once Jack Fyfe had soberly told
her she would never sense life's real values while she nursed so many
illusions. Monohan had been one of them.
"But it wouldn't work," she whispered to herself. "I couldn't do it.
He'd know I only did it because I was sorry, because I thought I should,
because the old ties, and they seem so many and so strong in spite of
everything, were harder to break than the new road is to follow alone.
He'd resent anything like pity for his loneliness. And if Monohan has
made any real trouble, it began over me, or at least it focussed on me.
And he might resent that. He's ten times a better man than I am a woman.
He thinks about the other fellow's side of things. I'm just what he said
about Charlie, self-centered, a profound egotist.
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