Had Sister Anne lived, she would have understood; and he would have laid himself and his new position at her feet and begged her to accept them--begged her to run away with him to this tremendous and terrifying capital of the world, and start the new life together.
Among all the women he knew, there was none to take her place.

Certainly Anita Flagg could not take her place.

Not because she was rich, not because she had jeered at him and made him a laughing-stock, not because his admiration--and he blushed when he remembered how openly, how ingenuously he had shown it to her--meant nothing; but because the girl he thought she was, the girl he had made dreams about and wanted to marry without a moment's notice, would have seen that what he offered, ridiculous as it was when offered to Anita Flagg, was not ridiculous when offered sincerely to a tired, nerve-worn, overworked nurse in a hospital.

It was because Anita Flagg had not seen that that she could not now make up to him for the girl he had lost, even though she herself had inspired that girl and for a day given her existence.
Had he known it, the Anita Flagg of his imagining was just as unlike and as unfair to the real girl as it was possible for two people to be.
His Anita Flagg he had created out of the things he had read of her in impertinent Sunday supplements and from the impression he had been given of her by the little ass, Holworthy.

She was not at all like that.
Ever since she had come of age she had been beset by sycophants and flatterers, both old and young, both men and girls, and by men who wanted her money and by men who wanted her.