"Perhaps," she admitted, "that is a point of view which I have not
sufficiently considered."
Helen pressed home her advantage.
"I don't think you realise, Philippa," she said, "how madly in love
with you the man is. In a perfectly ingenuous way, too. No one
could help seeing it."
"Then where does the unfairness come in?" Philippa asked. "It is
within my power to give him all that he wants."
"But you wouldn't do it, Philippa. You know that you wouldn't!"
Helen objected. "You may play with the idea in your mind, but
that's just as far as you'd ever get."
Philippa looked her friend steadily in the face. "I disagree with
you, Helen," she said. Helen set down the glass which she had
been in the act of raising to her lips. It was her first really
serious intimation of the tragedy which hovered over her future
sister-in-law's life. Somehow or other, Philippa had seemed, even
to her, so far removed from that strenuous world of over-drugged,
over-excited feminine decadence, to whom the changing of a husband
or a lover is merely an incident in the day's excitements.
Philippa, with her frail and almost flowerlike beauty, her love of
the wholesome ways of life, and her strong affections, represented
other things. Now, for the first time, Helen was really afraid,
afraid for her friend.
"But you couldn't ever--you wouldn't leave Henry!"
Philippa seemed to find nothing monstrous in the idea.
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