"Partly for the penalties I've had to pay, but chiefly for deserving them."
It seemed to him that her profile grew pensive. Though it detached itself clearly enough against the pane, it was a soft profile, a little blurred in the outline, with delicate curves of nose and lips and chin—the profile to go with dimpling smiles and a suffused sweetness. It pained him to notice that, though the suffused sweetness and the dimpling smiles were still as he remembered them, they didn't keep out of her face certain lines that had not been there when he saw her last.
"I think I ought to tell you," she said, after long reflection, "that I understand that sort of sympathy better now than I did some years ago. One grows more tolerant, if that's the right word, as one grows older."
"Does that mean that if certain things were to do again—you wouldn't do them?"
She took on an air of dignity. "That's something I can't talk about."
"But you think about it."
"Even so, I couldn't discuss it—with you."
"But I'm the very one with whom you could discuss it. Between us the conversation would be what lawyers call privileged."
She looked round at him for the first time since entering the compartment. "Is anything privileged between you and me?"
"Isn't everything?"