“Then you mustn’t mind if—if I put you to a test. Did you—did you write anything while you were there?”
“I printed something—in the same kind of letters you’ve seen at the bottom of architects’ plans.”
“And how did you come to do it?”
I recounted the circumstance, at which she nodded her head in verification.
“So that was how you knew the words you repeated to me a few months ago?”
“That was how. I said there were men in the world different from any you’d seen yet; and I told you to wait.”
She made a tremendous effort to become again the daring mistress of herself which she generally was. She smiled, too, nervously, and with a kind of sickening, ghastly whiteness.
“Funny, isn’t it? There are men in the world different from any I’d seen before that time. I’ve—I’ve waited—and found out.”
Before I could utter a rejoinder to this she said, quite courteously, “Will you excuse me?”
I bowed.