“No,” said he.

“I thought I’d have heard, if you had.”  She laughed queerly—­again shook out her hair, and it shimmered round her face and over her head and out from her shoulders like flames.  “You’ve got a kind of a—­Mr. Tetlow way of talking.  It doesn’t remind me of you as you were in Jersey City.”

She said nothing, she suggested nothing that had the least impropriety in it, or faintest hint of impropriety.  It was nothing positive, nothing aggressive, but a certain vague negative something that gave him the impression of innocence still innocent but looking or trying to look tolerantly where it should not.  And he felt dizzy and sick, stricken with shame and remorse and jealous fear.  Yes—­she was sliding slowly, gently, unconsciously down to the depth in which he had been lying, sick and shuddering—­no, to deeper depths—­to the depths where there is no light, no trace of a return path.  And he had started her down.  He had done it when he, in his pride and selfishness, had ignored what the success of his project would mean for her.  But he knew now; in bitterness and shame and degradation he had learned.  “I was infamous!” he said to himself.

She began to talk in a low, embarrassed voice: 

“Sometimes I think of getting married.  There’s a young man—­a young lawyer—­he makes twenty-five a week, but it’ll be years and years before he has a good living.  A man doesn’t get on fast in New York unless he has pull.”

Norman, roused from his remorse, blazed inside.  “You are in love with him?”

She laughed, and he could not tell whether it was to tease him or to evade.

“You’d not care about him long,” said Norman, “unless there were more money coming in than he’d be likely to get soon.  Love without money doesn’t go—­at least, not in New York.”

“Do you suppose I don’t know that?” said she with the irritation of one faced by a hateful fact.  “Still—­I don’t see what to do.”

Norman, biting his lip and fuming and observing her with jealous eyes, said in the best voice he could command, “How long have you been in love with him?”

“Did I say I was in love?” mocked she.

“You didn’t say you weren’t.  Who is he?”

“If you’ll stay on about half an hour or so, you’ll see him.  No—­you can’t.  I’ve got to get dressed before I let him up.  He has very strict ideas—­where I’m concerned.”

“Then why did you let me come up?” Norman said, with a penetrating glance.

She lowered her gaze and a faint flush stole into her cheeks.  Was it confession of the purpose he suspected?  Or, was it merely embarrassment?

“I heard of a case once,” continued Norman, his gaze significantly direct, “the case of a girl who was in love with a poor young fellow.  She wanted money—­luxury.  Also, she wanted the poor young fellow.”

The color flamed into the girl’s face, then left it pale.  Her white fingers fluttered with nervous grace into her masses of hair and back to her lap again, to rest there in timid quiet.