"Why do you say that?"
"Because—" Keegan hesitated. Mysterious impulses were operating behind his talk. The night's debauch had sickened him. He was experiencing that depressing type of virtue which usually comes as a reaction from an orgy. His indignation at the bestiality of the male and the moral rotteness of life was a vindication of the temporary weakened state the night had induced in him. By denouncing sex he excused the disturbing absence of it in himself.
He was however not content to vindicate the absence in himself of sensual excitement. He would also make use of his lassitude by translating the enervation it produced into self-ennobling emotions, into purity, innate and triumphant. He experienced high-minded ideas and an exaltation of spirit.
"Because," he repeated, finding it difficult to choose words sufficiently emasculated to reflect the phenomenal purity of his mind, "well, if women knew, they would never talk to men. But women are so good, that is, decent women, that they simply don't understand and can't understand ... what it is."
"About bad men?" Fanny whispered. Keegan nodded.
"And are all men bad?" she asked.
Again Keegan nodded, this time more sadly. It was a nod of confession and purity. In it he felt his obscene past and his pious future embrace each other, one whispering "forgive" and the other whispering "yes, yes. All is forgiven."
Tears warmed his throat. Fanny's eyes looked at him with an odd excitement. Her mind was as always conveniently blank of thought. Thoughts would have served only to embarrass and handicap her. She was able to enjoy herself more easily without thinking. It was a ruse which enabled her to regard herself as a clean-minded girl.
Young men had frequently taken advantage of her kindness and grown bold. They would during a tender embrace sometimes take liberties or draw her close and press themselves against her. It was at this point that her mind would awake like a burglar alarm suddenly set off. It rang and clanged—an outraged and intimidating ding-dong of virtuous platitudes which she had incongruously rigged up in the sensual warmth of her nature. But lately the mechanism by which she routed her would-be seducers did not quite satisfy her.
At twenty she had grown fearful. When she was younger the men she led on were no more than boys. The mechanism had sufficed for them. But the last two years had witnessed a change in her would-be seducers. They had grown up, these males. She remembered always uncomfortably a young man who had burst into laughter during her outraged denunciation of him. He had said to her.