"To you?"
"Why, to me she never varied. 'Son,' she'd say, 'that isn't the way to do. We can't risk it.' So I turned aside and ate good crusty bread and drank milk. I didn't want cake. I didn't want Peter's coffee. But I wonder how it would seem to have ridden them all bareback, all vices, all indulgences, and conquered them after I'd known them—not turned aside and gone the other way."
In that mood she hardly knew him. The clean, sweet, childlike quality had gone; it had fled before this breath of the passion of life. She felt vaguely how wrong he was. He was idealizing the world as he did not know it and the conquest of the world as it appeared in her father, the master of all its arts.
"Playmate," she said, though she was doubtful of her own wisdom.
"Yes, playmate."
"There isn't anything desirable in evil knowledge. I've heard him say—you know—"
"Tom Fulton?"
"Yes. I've heard him say he wanted to know everything about life—bad and good. He was black with knowledge. I might have learned it from him. I thank God he spared me that. I wish you would be grateful for your clean life. I wish you'd see there's no magic in the things my father knows, for instance. It's better to make a lily grow."
"Ah, but I've discovered things in myself that are exactly like the things in other men—and other men are used to them. So when an ugly beast puts up its head, the man gives it a crack and knocks it silly. Then it lies down a spell, and the man goes about his business. He gets used to its growling and clawing away at intervals. He's only to knock it down. But I don't fully know yet what is in that pit of mine. I discovered something to-day."
"What?"