“I suppose so.  Different people express love differently.  There’s no use in asking you to be different—­”

She said, piteously:  “I’m trying.  Don’t you see I’m trying?  Give me time, Louis!  Make allowances.  You can’t utterly change people in a few hours.”

He gazed at her intently for a moment.

“You mean that you are trying to be fair to—­her?”

“I—­if you call it that;—­yes!  But a family can not adapt itself, instantaneously, to such a cataclysm as threatens—­I mean—­I mean—­oh, Louis!  Try to understand us and sympathise a little with us!”

His arms closed around her shoulders: 

“Little sister, we both have the family temper—­and beneath it, the family instinct for cohesion.  If we are also selfish it is not individual but family selfishness.  It is the family which has always said to the world, ‘Noli me tangere!’ while we, individually, are really inclined to be kinder, more sympathetic, more curious about the neighbours outside our gate.  Let it be so now.  Once inside the family, what can harm Valerie?”

“Dearest, dearest brother,” she murmured, “you talk like a foolish man.  Women understand better.  And if it is a part of your program that this girl is to be accepted by an old-fashioned society, now almost obsolete, but in which this family is merely a single superannuated unit, that program can never be carried out.”

“I think you are mistaken,” he said.

“I know I am not.  It is inevitable that if you marry this girl she will be more or less ignored, isolated, humiliated, overlooked outside our own little family circle.  Even in that limited mob which the newspapers call New York Society—­in that modern, wealthy, hard-witted, over-jewelled, self-sufficient league which is yet too eternally uncertain of its own status to assume any authority or any responsibility for a stranger without credentials,—­it would not be possible to make Valerie West acceptable in the slightest sense of the word.  Because she is too well known; her beauty is celebrated; she has become famous.  Her only chance there—­or with us—­would have been in her absolute anonymity.  Then lies might have done the rest.  But lying is now useless in regard to her.”

“Perfectly,” he said.  “She would not permit it.”

In his vacant gaze there was something changed—­a fixedness born of a slow and hopeless enlightenment.

“If that is the case, there is no chance,” he said thoughtfully.  “I had not considered that aspect.”

“I had.”

He shook his head slightly, gazing through the window at the starry lustre overhead.

“I wouldn’t care,” he said, “if she would only marry me.  If she’d do that I’d never bother anybody—­nor embarrass the family—­”

“Louis!”

“I mean make any social demands on you....  And, as for the world—­” He slowly shook his head again:  “We could make our own friends and our own way—­if she would only consent to do it.  But she never will.”