know that lots of the time you can do it—­in spite of the folks who write the books!  Maybe it wasn’t so when the books were written, maybe it’s only going to be so, later, if we all are as square as we can be now.  But as a plain matter of fact, in one girl’s experience, it’s so, now!  Of course,” she modified by a sweeping qualification the audacity of her naively phrased, rashly innocent guess at a new possibility for humanity, “of course if the man’s a decent man.”

Arnold had not taken his gaze for an instant from her gravely thoughtful eyes.  He was quite pale.  He looked astonishingly moved, startled, arrested.  When she stopped, he said, almost at once, in a very queer voice as though it were forced out of him, “I’m not a decent man.”

And then, quite as though he could endure no longer her clear, steady gaze, he covered his eyes with his hand.  An instant later he had sprung up and walked rapidly away out to the low marble parapet which topped the terrace.  His gesture, his action had been so eloquent of surprised, intolerable pain, that Sylvia ran after him, all one quick impulse to console.  “Yes, you are, Arnold; yes, you are!” she said in a low, energetic tone, “you are!”

He made a quavering attempt to be whimsical.  “I’d like to know what you know about it!” he said.

“I know!  I know!” she simply repeated.

He faced her in an exasperated shame.  “Why, a girl like you can no more know what’s done by a man like me ...” his lips twitched in a moral nausea.

“Oh ... what you’ve done ...” said Sylvia ... “it’s what you are!”

“What I am,” repeated Arnold bitterly.  “If I were worth my salt I’d hang myself before morning!” The heartsick excitement of a man on the crest of some moral crisis looked out luridly from his eyes.

Sylvia rose desperately to meet that crisis.  “Look here, Arnold.  I’m going to tell you something I’ve never spoken of to anybody ... not even Mother ... and I’m going to do it, so you’ll believe me when I say you’re worth living.  When I was eighteen years old I was a horrid, selfish, self-willed child.  I suppose everybody’s so at eighteen.  I was just crazy for money and fine dresses and things like that, that we’d never had at home; and a man with a lot of money fell in love with me.  It was my fault.  I made him, though I didn’t know then what I was doing, or at least I wouldn’t let myself think what I was doing.  And I got engaged to him.  I got engaged at half-past four in the afternoon, and at seven o’clock that evening I was running away from him, and I’ve never seen him since.”  Her voice went on steadily, but a quick hot wave of scarlet flamed up over her face.  “He was not a decent man,” she said briefly, and went on:  “It frightened me almost to death before I got my bearings:  I was just a little girl and I hadn’t understood anything—­and I don’t understand