“You’ll see that it’s all for the best; that you’re well out of it.  If she could throw you over, after leading you on—­”

“But she didn’t lead me on!” exclaimed Mavering.  “Don’t you understand that it was all my mistake from the first?  If I hadn’t been perfectly besotted I should have seen that she was only tolerating me.  Don’t you see?  Why, hang it, Boardman, I must have had a kind of consciousness of it under my thick-skinned conceit, after all, for when I came to the point—­when I did come to the point—­I hadn’t the sand to stick to it like a man, and I tried to get her to help me.  Yes, I can see that I did now.  I kept fooling about, and fooling about, and it was because I had that sort of prescience—­of whatever you call it—­that I was mistaken about it from the very beginning.”

He wished to tell Boardman about the events of the night before; but he could not.  He said to himself that he did not care about their being hardly to his credit; but he did not choose to let Alice seem to have resented anything in them; it belittled her, and claimed too much for him.  So Boardman had to proceed upon a partial knowledge of the facts.

“I don’t suppose that boomerang way of yours, if that’s what you mean, was of much use,” he said.

“Use?  It ruined me!  But what are you going to do?  How are you going to presuppose that a girl like Miss Pasmer is interested in an idiot like you?  I mean me, of course.”  Mavering broke off with a dolorous laugh.  “And if you can’t presuppose it, what are you going to do when it comes to the point?  You’ve got to shillyshally, and then you’ve got to go it blind.  I tell you it’s a leap in the dark.”

“Well, then, if you’ve got yourself to blame—­”

“How am I to blame, I should like to know?” retorted Mavering, rejecting the first offer from another of the censure which he had been heaping upon himself:  the irritation of his nerves spoke.  “I did speak out at last—­when it was too late.  Well, let it all go,” he groaned aimlessly.  “I don’t care.  But she isn’t to blame.  I don’t think I could admire anybody very much who admired me.  No, sir.  She did just right.  I was a fool, and she couldn’t have treated me differently.”

“Oh, I guess it’ll come out all right,” said Boardman, abandoning himself to mere optimism.

“How come all right?” demanded Mavering, flattered by the hope he refused.  “It’s come right now.  I’ve got my deserts; that’s all.”

“Oh no, you haven’t.  What harm have you done?  It’s all right for you to think small beer of yourself, and I don’t see how you could think anything else just at present.  But you wait awhile.  When did it happen?”

Mavering took out his watch.  “One day, one hour, twenty minutes, and fifteen seconds ago.”

“Sure about the seconds?  I suppose you didn’t hang round a great while afterward?”

“Well, people don’t, generally,” said Mavering, with scorn.