This was a lie, reflecting credit, however, on the youth's dramatic sense and vanity. The knowledge that the creature under discussion had been actually no different from the six other ladies of her profession with whom he had experienced moral collapses since leaving the university in no way interfered with his opinion of the recent episode.
It was his opinion that things he touched were somehow different from things other young men dallied with; that events which befell him were of a certain mysterious fiber lacking in the events which befell others. Thus he was reduced to the necessity of continual lying in order to vindicate this conviction, more powerful than reality. Lying to himself as much as to anyone else. By his lies Basine accomplished the dual purpose of adjusting inferior incidents to the superiority of his nature and of impressing this superiority upon his friends. A way of rewriting life so as to fit himself with the heroic part, as yet denied him in the manuscript and which he sincerely felt was his due.
"Yes, she cried a bit. They usually do, you know."
Keegan was innocent of this phenomenon, but nodded. He felt mysteriously saddened by the fact that they never wept for him. Life denied him many things. The creature he had spent the night with had treated him somewhat brutally. She had laughed several times. He sought, however, to make up for the indifference with which he felt himself treated by heightening his contempt for her as a sinner. This necessitated an increase of his contempt for himself as having been a partner in evil. But that was a spiritual gesture made bearable by the wave of remorse it aroused and by the knowledge that remorse was a laudable emotion. Nevertheless, despite the remorse and the rehabilitation it offered his vanity, he continued to feel—life denied him many things.
Basine continued, "You could take a girl like that and make something of her. Give her a month." By which he meant give George Cornelius Basine a month and see the miracle he would work.
Keegan sighed. He admired George, and his admiration of others always depressed him. He was intelligent enough to know that he admired things he lacked. And yet, he assured himself, he would despise the things in himself that he admired in others. Therefore, it was very probable that he despised them in others, or would at some later day, unless he managed to conceal the fact or lose track of it in the confusion of platitudes which served him for a brain. He looked enviously at his friend, before whom hardened trollops dissolved in tears.
"She's only been in the game a little while, you know, Hugh. A convent girl, too. She told me her story. How she got started, you know. A love affair with a Spaniard. A highly connected fellow."
Basine prattled on, improvising a melodrama of virtue led astray, editing the vaguely worded generalities of the creature he had left asleep. Eventually he tired of the game and announced abruptly.
"Not a car in sight. What do you say we walk, Hugh?"
The idea of walking four miles home after a wild night engaged his vanity. Things by which he proved the dubious superiority of his body pleased him.