Marjorie looked at him for a moment as if she wanted to do something violent to him. Then she spoke. CHAPTER VII "I see what you mean," she said. "I wasn't sporting in the first place--I wouldn't live up to my bargain. That's made you more apt to believe that I've been acting the same way ever since. You don't think I can see _any_thing through. Well--not particularly for your sake--more for my own, I guess--I'm going to see this through, if I die doing it. I'll stay--and take Pierre's place, Francis." Francis's severe young face did not change at all. "Very well," he said. "But you understand," she went on, "that I'm not doing this to win anything but my own self-respect. And at the end of the three months, of course, I shall go back to New York. And you'll let me go, and see that I get free." "I wouldn't do anything else for the world," said Francis in the same unmoved voice. "Very well, then--we understand each other." She turned to Logan, who had sprung to his feet and tried to interfere a couple of times while she talked. "And please remember that this arrangement does not go beyond us three," she said. "I would prefer that no one else knew how matters stood." Logan looked a little baffled. He was ten years older than either of them, but so many actual clashing things happening had never come his way before. His ten years' advantage had been spent writing stylistic essays, and such do not fit one for stepping down into the middle of a lot of primitive young emotions. He felt suddenly helpless before these passionate, unjust, emotional young people. He felt a little forlorn, too, as if the main currents of things had been sweeping them by while he stood carefully on the bank, trying not to get his feet wet. A very genuine emotion of pity for Marjorie had brought him up here, pity more mixed with something else than he had been willing to admit. It was the first thing he had done for a long, long time that was romantic and unconsidered and actual. And it appeared that, after all, he wasn't needed. Concentration on the nuances of minor fifteenth-century poets had unfitted him for being swept on, as these had been, by the world-currents. They had married each other, pushed by the mating instinct in the air--the world's insistence on marriage to balance the death that had swept it. Now they were struggling to find their balance against each other, to be decent, to be fair, to make themselves and each other what they thought they ought to be. He could see what they were doing and why much more clearly than they could themselves. But he couldn't be a part of it--he had stood aside from life too long, with his nerves and his passion for artistic details and pleasures of the intellect. But he bowed quietly, and smiled a little. He felt suddenly very tired.