That evening, though, after she had bidden him good night, she changed her mind and came back into his room.  There had been something wistful about his kiss that, determined her.

“Which of them wrote to you about me?” she asked.

“Both,” he told her.  “Of course I should have known you’d guess.  Forgive me for having tried to—­manage you.  I’ll show you both their letters if you like.  It’s a breach of confidence, of course, but I don’t know that I could do better.”

“I’ll read Rush’s,” she said.  “Not the other.”

She carried it over to the lamp, and for a while after she had taken in its easily grasped intent she went on turning its pages back and forth while she sought for an end of the tangled skein of her thoughts to hold on by.

Finally, “Do you want me to marry him, dad?” she asked.  Then, before he could answer she hurried on.  “I mean, would it relieve you from some nightmare worry about me if I did?—­This has to be plain talk, doesn’t it, if it is to get us anywhere?”

“That’s a fair question of yours,” he said.  But he wasn’t ready at once with an answer.  “It would be such a relief, provided you really wanted to marry him.  That goes to the bottom of it, I think.  My responsibility is to make it possible for you to—­follow your heart.  To marry or not as you wish.  To marry a poor man if you wish.  But if Graham is your choice and all that holds you back from him is some remediable misunderstanding—­or failure to understand ...”

“I don’t know whether it’s remediable or not,” she said; and added, “I told him I would marry him if I could.  Did he tell you that?”

It was a mistake to have quoted that expression to her father.  He took it just as Graham had.  Of course!  What else could he think?  She sat with clenched hands and a dry throat, listening while he tried to enlighten what he took to be her innocent misunderstanding.

They had never spoken, she realized, about matters of sex.  For anything he really knew to the contrary she might have been as ignorant as a child.  He was actually talking as one talks to a child;—­kindly, tolerantly, tenderly, but with an unconscious touch of patronage, like one trying to explain away—­misgivings about Santa Claus!  There were elements, inevitably, in a man’s love for a woman, that a young girl could not understand.  Nothing but experience could bring that understanding home to her.  This was what in one way after another, he was trying to convey.

But the intuition which, in good times or bad, always betrayed their emotions to each other, showed him that he was, somehow missing the mark.  Her silence through his tentative little pauses disconcerted him heavily.  He ran down at last like an unwound clock.

It was only after a long intolerably oppressive silence that she found her voice.  “The misunderstanding isn’t what you think,” she said.  “Nor what Graham thinks.  It’s his misunderstanding, not mine.  He thinks that I am—­a sort of innocent angel that he’s not good enough for.  And the fact is that I’m not—­not innocent enough for him.  Not an angel at all.  Not even quite—­good.”