"I understand what persons like you and me can suffer, and how much they need help, and how the mock of love unfulfilled can drive them into hideous rocks and sink them in a seething whirlpool of temptations. I can read your life like a book now—can read it by the lurid light of my own burning wreck. And so I know that whatever might happen you would be forgivable. And it's what I know—what I have learned—that I want to tell him. And whatever is wrong—if he believes it—if I can make him believe—However, it—" And there he stopped—broke off abruptly.
Nina was staring at him hard.
He had spoken so fast and in such a passion of pleading that he appeared to be for the moment breathless. She sat there before him in the low chair she had chosen, and her eyes were fixed on him.
He had poured forth the last phrases with his head bowed and his hands gripping the edge of the velvet-draped shelf behind him.
It was she who spoke next.
"There is no one for you to go to," she said—"no one in all the wide world. As to my husband, it was a kind of accident. But really I didn't care if it hadn't been. All my crimes are against myself. I've injured no one else. Do you understand?"
He nodded dumbly, feeling rather blank.
"There is no 'man' in my life," she went on. "I never have 'loved' as women are supposed to love. I've just liked men—liked them as such—that was all."
She paused briefly, looking at him, expecting some word; but he was silent.
"I've never been really bad," she continued. "I've never wanted to be bad. But I like to be kissed, and I've been so unhappy through just sheer loneliness that I could only remember a few of the commandments, and the marriage service not at all."