“I got along just fine until I met you,” she lamented, almost with an air of reproach, though no one could honestly reproach Jerome very heavily with having lured astray a girl of Lili’s qualities, experience, and temperament. As a matter of fact, her conscience troubled her a little about that wretched soldier....
“I feel just as bad over it as you do,” Jerome assured her. “But I can’t see the good of sitting here crying.”
“You can’t understand how a woman feels, Jerry.”
“Maybe not,” he admitted, at the same time realizing that at any rate he knew just how a man feels under the circumstances.
It wasn’t an agreeable feeling. It was a feeling, in fact, that would have knocked the bottom right out of his small universe a few months ago. But his universe was growing bigger, and he seemed to be growing along with it. In the old days Jerome would hardly have known what to do with obligations of any but the most rudimentary sort. But he had digested a perfectly marvellous fund of experience. The old unfledged Jerome, who used to eat his lunches on the step of the factory that made a leader of forty-nine cent chocolates, would no doubt have frozen with horror at the notion of sitting down opposite a girl and discussing such an issue as this. But now, while very far indeed from looking upon it as a pleasant situation, or one that could be handled with any degree of lightness, Jerome conceived it a natural enough thing to be a partner in the dilemma: the obligation was one he had helped to create. A man wasn’t a man who would allow himself to be scandalized by what had to be, no matter _what_.
He was at once so advanced and still so immature—knew life and didn’t yet know life, in a breath. But he argued with blunt assurance: “Don’t you see, Lili? All we have to do is get married. Everything will be all right.” He threw away his cigarette and, reaching over between the empty glasses, drew the girl’s hands gently down into his on the table. “I’ve tried hard enough to make you marry me; now, perhaps, you’ll listen to reason!” But he smiled a little sadly, for his ego told him there was something radically wrong about the way his romance was running.
“Jerry,” said the girl at length, looking at him seriously, “I guess the time’s come when I’ve got to tell you the truth about me. I can’t marry you, even now, because I’m married already.”