I tried to tell her, but I suppose I did it badly. Put into a few bald
words the tale was not merely sordid, it was low. I could give it no
softening touch, no saving grace. It was more beastly than I had ever
imagined it.
Fortunately she didn’t listen with attention. The means were indifferent
to her when she knew the end. For the minute, at any rate, she saw me not
as I stood there, clean and in white, but as I had been a year before,
dirty and in rags. But she saw more than that. With every word I uttered
she saw the ideal she had formed broken into shivers, like a shattered
looking-glass.
She interrupted my preposterous story to gasp, “I can’t believe it!”
“But it’s true.”
“Then you mustn’t mind if—if I put you to a test. Did you—did you write
anything while you were there?”
“I printed something—in the same kind of letters you’ve seen at the
bottom of architects’ plans.”
“And how did you come to do it?”
I recounted the circumstance, at which she nodded her head in
verification.
“So that was how you knew the words you repeated to me a few months ago?”
“That was how. I said there were men in the world different from any
you’d seen yet; and I told you to wait.”
She made a tremendous effort to become again the daring mistress of
herself which she generally was. She smiled, too, nervously, and with a
kind of sickening, ghastly whiteness.
“Funny, isn’t it? There are men in the world different from any I’d seen
before that time. I’ve—I’ve waited—and found out.”
Before I could utter a rejoinder to this she said, quite courteously,
“Will you excuse me?”