“Few girls do when they talk.  They apparently prefer to use their hands to their brains.”  Selwyn’s shoulders shrugged impatiently, then his teeth came together on his lip.  Again he stared ahead and, save for Bettina’s chatter, we walked in silence to Scarborough Square.

There had been few times in my life in which speech was impossible, but during the quarter of an hour it took us to reach home words would not come, and numbness possessed my body.  A world of possibilities, a world I did not know, seemed suddenly revealing itself, and at its dark depths and sinister shadows I was frightened, and more than frightened.  Conflicting and confusing emotions, a sense of outrage and revolt, were making me first hot and then cold, and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping me beyond resistance.  The happy ignorance and unconcern and indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanishing before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, because of its ugliness, its offensiveness, its repulsiveness, I had wanted to know nothing about, I knew I would now be forced to face.

It was true what Mrs. Mundy and Aunt Matilda and Selwyn and even Kitty, four years younger than myself, had often told me, that in knowledge of certain phases of life I was unwarrantably lacking.  Subjects that had seemingly interested other girls and other women had never interested me, and I took no part in their discussion.  And now the protection of the past that had prevented understanding of sordid situations and polluting possibilities was being roughly torn away, and I was seeing that which not only stung and shocked and sickened, but I was seeing myself as one who after selfish sleep had been rudely waked.

Head and heart hot, I pushed back upleaping questions, forced down surging suspicion and tormenting fears, but all the while I was conscious that in the friendship that was mine and Selwyn’s, the something that was more than friendship, a great gap had opened that was separating us.  If he gave no explanation of his acquaintance with the girl he had just left, it must be because he could not.  He knew my hatred of mystery, my insistence upon frankness between friends.  Would he come in and talk as freely as he had ever done of whatever concerned him?  Would he tell me—­

As I opened the door with my latch-key Bettina bounded inside, and the light falling on Selwyn’s face showed it white and worn.  Something was greatly troubling him.

“Good night.”  He turned toward the steps without offering his hand.  “It is useless to ask you not to go in such neighborhoods as you were in this evening, but if you knew what you were doing you would stay away.”

“I know very well what I am doing.  I am hardly so stubborn or wilful as you think.  But if it is unwise for me to be in the neighborhood referred to, is it any less wise—­for you?”

“Me?” The inflection in his voice was the eternal difference in a man’s and woman’s privileges.  “It was not a question of wisdom—­my being where you saw me.  It was one of necessity.  Moreover, a man can go where he pleases.  A woman can’t.  No purity of purpose can overcome the tyranny of convention.”