“Oh, you can’t?”
“Why can’t I.”
“Because—because it isn’t—it isn’t possible! You”—she seemed to be shivering—“you could never have—”
“But I did.”
She gasped brokenly. “You? You?”
I nodded. “Yes—I.”
I tried to tell her, but I suppose I did it badly. Put into a few bald words the tale was not merely sordid, it was low. I could give it no softening touch, no saving grace. It was more beastly than I had ever imagined it.
Fortunately she didn’t listen with attention. The means were indifferent to her when she knew the end. For the minute, at any rate, she saw me not as I stood there, clean and in white, but as I had been a year before, dirty and in rags. But she saw more than that. With every word I uttered she saw the ideal she had formed broken into shivers, like a shattered looking-glass.
She interrupted my preposterous story to gasp, “I can’t believe it!”
“But it’s true.”