I stopped blankly. "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice of words to have made.
I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
"I drifted into this--as men do," I said after a little pause and stopped again.
She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you--that I expected--"
"But how can you know?"
"I know. I do know."
"But--" I began.
"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids. "Of course I know," and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not know.
"All men--" she generalised. "A woman does not understand these temptations."
I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession. . . .
"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent difficulty, "it is all over and past."
"It's all over and past," I answered.
There was a little pause.
"I don't want to know," she said. "None of that seems to matter now in the slightest degree."
