“I mean to say, we should have enough to start on, and... of course I've made an infernal hash of everything I've tried up till now, but there must be something I can do, and you can jolly well bet I'd have a goodish stab at it. I mean to say, with you to buck me up and so forth, don't you know. Well, I mean...”
“Has it struck you that I may already be engaged to someone else?”
For the first time he turned and faced her, and there was a look in his eyes which touched Sally and drove all sense of the ludicrous out of her. Absurd as it was, this man was really serious.
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I am,” she said soberly.
Ginger Kemp bit his lip and for a moment was silent.
“Oh, well, that's torn it!” he said at last.
Sally was aware of an emotion too complex to analyse. There was pity in it, but amusement too. The emotion, though she did not recognize it, was maternal. Mothers, listening to their children pleading with engaging absurdity for something wholly out of their power to bestow, feel that same wavering between tears and laughter. Sally wanted to pick Ginger up and kiss him. The one thing she could not do was to look on him, sorry as she was for him, as a reasonable, grown-up man.
“Don't I!” said Ginger, hollowly. “Oh, don't I!”
“You can't! There isn't such a thing in real life as love at first sight. Love's a thing that comes when you know a person well and...” She paused. It had just occurred to her that she was hardly the girl to lecture in this strain. Her love for Gerald Foster had been sufficiently sudden, even instantaneous. What did she know of Gerald except that she loved him? They had become engaged within two weeks of their first meeting. She found this recollection damping to her eloquence, and ended by saying tamely:
Ginger had simmered down to a mood of melancholy resignation.
“I couldn't have expected you to care for me, I suppose, anyway,” he said, sombrely. “I'm not much of a chap.”
It was just the diversion from the theme under discussion which Sally had been longing to find. She welcomed the chance of continuing the conversation on a less intimate and sentimental note.
“That's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said, seizing the opportunity offered by this display of humility. “I've been looking for you all day to go on with what I was starting to say in the lift last night when we were interrupted. Do you mind if I talk to you like an aunt--or a sister, suppose we say? Really, the best plan would be for you to adopt me as an honorary sister. What do you think?”