“But anyway, he told me what a regular little sister I’d been to him, and—being seven kinds of a fool, as you know—I fell for it, and first thing I knew, he was sitting here on the couch beside me, holding my hand. And I confess—Oh, I’m being terribly frank! If you ever are so beastly as to go and use this against me later, I’ll kill you, I swear I will! … I didn’t mind the hand-holding a bit. … Am I a hussy? I’m afraid I could become one! … But anyway—I mean: He has some electricity about him; he’s a very educated hand-holder; not too tight, and yet he sort of makes you shudder—
“But anyway, he held my hand as though it were some particularly sacred relic. And he went on telling me that my example had persuaded him that he must stop wandering and settle down with some glorious girl like me. And I believed it all! I felt like a Sister by a dying bedside!
“But anyway, he was going to cut out all this drifting and really do something with life. He said that! ‘Do something with life!’ I might have known!
“And then—
“Oh, you know what he said! I don’t have to tell you. Probably you’ve said it to some cutie yourself! Only, if I ever catch you doing it, I’ll kill you! You and I are the model monogamists from now on, d’you understand? Anyway, you can guess what he said. Where was he to find the admirable spouse who’d be exactly like me?
“And of course I made noises like a purr-pussy!
“And the next thing I knew, he’d thrown his arms around me, and he was trying to kiss me, and he was at the same time trying to inform me that I’d led him on—Oh, I can sound funny about it, now, or try to, anyway. But it was pretty fairly ghastly. The idiot insisted on doing a real ‘Woman, you have tempted me to perdition with your poisoned smile’ sort of melodrama. Oh, Sam, Sam, Sam dear—you old darling! You’re so decent! But I mean: When he found that I was most certainly not going to be embraced, he got awfully nasty. That’s one thing he does do well! He said I’d led him on. He said that among ‘civilized people’ there were ‘rules of the game,’ and the way I’d let him kiss my shoulder—Oh yes, he did that, too, in the taxicab going to dinner. Oh, I am being frank, probably disastrously frank! But, dear, don’t treasure it up and use it against a pitiful fool that thought she was a woman of the world! And honestly, I really and truly did think, when he kissed my shoulder, that if I just ignored it he’d have sense enough to see that I wasn’t taking any. ‘Rules of the game among civilized people!’ The fool! As if I didn’t understand them just as well as he does, and maybe a lot better! But anyway—
“And maybe I liked his kissing my shoulder! Oh, I don’t know! I don’t know anything, after this ghastly evening! But anyway:
“He said it was my fault, and so on and so forth—you can imagine—and then he saw that he couldn’t bully me, and he was terribly apologetic about ‘showing his true feelings’—the swine hasn’t got any true feelings! Anyway, he kissed my ear and my nose—a rotten marksman!—and he pleaded and—Oh, I don’t know why you should have to listen to all the ghastly details! Anyway, I kicked him out, and he—oh, he was charming, my dear!—he went back to his delightful assertion that all American women are bloodless rotters, who get a kick out of seeing men make fools of themselves and—
“Oh, oh yes, and he also said this. This really was pretty, and it’ll interest you particularly! Though it certainly wasn’t very consistent with his bleat about my being a bloodless siren! He said—he made it quite clear that he didn’t merely expect a few consoling kisses, and he said that I didn’t know how much sex passion there was concealed in me. He said that you—he was so kind as to indicate that you were a worthy motor-peddler and quite a nice kind friend, and probably you could defend yourself if you were attacked by bandits, but you had no sexual fire—‘spiritual fire’—I think he said, to be exact—and I was what he called ‘unawakened,’ and he was willing—bless his dear, kind, neighborly soul!—he was willing to do the awakening.
“Oh, Sam, I’m trying to be funny about it, but actually I’ve never been so insulted, so hurt, so horribly misunderstood, so innocent—
“Or do you think I led him on, too?”
Through all her vehement chronicle, Sam had been sorry for her, most successfully; he had tried to agree with her, not very successfully; and, while he stroked her hair, he had studied a print on the wall.
He had not, till now, been very conscious of their sitting-room. But in these seconds he so concentrated on it that he could never forget one minutest detail: the walls, cornflower blue; the ceiling, dull gold; a wing chair in cretonne with cabbage roses; the mahogany escritoire, with elegant books of English memoirs, recently purchased by Fran, on the shelves above the writing tablet, on which she had made neat piles of
