Read Online The Fourth Side of the Triangle by Ellery Queen - Free Book Online

and said, “Sheila, I want you to marry me.”
    â€œI know, Dane.”
    She knew!
    â€œThen you will?” he cried.
    â€œNo.”
    It was like setting his foot down where a step should have been, but was not. A scalding wave of humiliation washed over him; and suddenly he thought of his father. This was how his father would feel; this was his punishment for having planned the whole dirty thing. Was she laughing at him? Had she seen through him from the start?
    He looked at her wildly.
    â€œDarling, I’m not refusing you,” murmured Sheila, and she took his head between her hands and kissed him on the lips.
    â€œI guess I’m too thick-witted to get it.”
    â€œI love you, Dane. You can have me right now. But not as your wife.”
    Not as my wife? “Are you married?” She was married …
    â€œHeavens, no!” She laughed at that. Then she looked into his face and without a word went to the bar and splashed brandy into a snifter and held the glass to his lips. He took it from her roughly.
    â€œYou mean you’ll sleep with me,” he said, “but you won’t marry me.”
    â€œThat’s right, darling.”
    â€œBut you just said you love me.”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œThen I don’t understand!”
    She stroked his cheek. “I suppose you considered yourself a thoroughly seasoned old rip, and here you have to discover that you’re just a sweet old square. No, not yet, Dane. I must get this over to you. It’s important to both of us.”
    What she went on to say was not at all what he was expecting. She made no reference to Ashton McKell; she was not, after all, rejecting a new love in favor of the incumbent. She had known for some time, she told Dane, that she loved him.
    â€œI’m speaking only for myself, dearest—I know my ideas are anti-social, and that society couldn’t exist if everyone acted according to my views. I’m essentially a selfish woman, Dane. It’s not that I don’t care about what happens to people; but I’m most concerned with what happens to me in this very short life we’re given. I suppose I’m a materialist. My notion of love doesn’t require marriage to consummate it, that’s all. In fact—I’m speaking only for myself—I reject the whole concept of marriage. I’m no more capable of being happy as a housewife, or a country club gal, or a young suburban matron than I am of renouncing the world and taking the veil.
    â€œMaybe love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, as the song says,” Sheila went on, taking his cold hand, “but I’m an electronic-age-type dame. To me a ring on the finger is like a ring in the nose. What a mockery modern marriage is! No wonder divorce is one of our leading industries. I can’t stomach the hypocrisy of marriage, so I side-step it. Can you picture me billing and cooing ten years after in a vine-covered cottage beside a waterfall?”
    She laughed. He looked at her woodenly.
    â€œThe trouble is, of course, that I don’t need a man to support me. I certainly don’t need your money—I have plenty of my own. I don’t hanker after social position; I have a pretty elevated position in my own sector of society. And I certainly couldn’t subordinate myself to your career, because I have my own—what’s worse, mine is made, while yours is still in the making. Marriage is all right for women in a bourgeois society …”
    â€œWhat about children?” Dane asked her bitterly. “Doesn’t your advanced concept include the little matter of children?”
    â€œNot especially. Let those propagate the race who can’t propagate anything else; Lord knows there are enough of them. I love children as much as the next woman, but in this life we have to make hard choices. I’ve made mine, and motherhood has no place in it. So you see, Dane, what