"
Thursdale colored again. "Free?" he stammered, with a sense of
physical disgust at contact with such crassness.
"Yes--if I had quite done with you." She smiled in recovered
security. "It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for
definitions."
"Yes--well?" he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.
"Well--and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she
wanted me to define _my_ status--to know exactly where I had stood
all along."
Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the
clue. "And even when you had told her that--"
"Even when I had told her that I had _had_ no status--that I had
never stood anywhere, in any sense she meant," said Mrs. Vervain,
slowly--"even then she wasn't satisfied, it seems."
He uttered an uneasy exclamation. "She didn't believe you, you
mean?"
"I mean that she _did_ believe me: too thoroughly."
"Well, then--in God's name, what did she want?"
"Something more--those were the words she used."
"Something more? Between--between you and me? Is it a conundrum?" He
laughed awkwardly.
"Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer
forbidden to contemplate the relation of the sexes."
"So it seems!" he commented. "But since, in this case, there wasn't
any--" he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.
"That's just it. The unpardonable offence has been--in our not
offending."
He flung himself down despairingly. "I give it up!--What did you
tell her?" he burst out with sudden crudeness.
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