"What?" cried Million, looking almost scandalised. "I don't believe you can mean what you say!"
"I do mean what I say," I persisted, as we walked along. "I think that if one really cared for a man, the 'caring' would go on, whatever one found him out in. He might be a murderer. Or a forger. Or he might be in the habit of making love to every pretty woman he saw. Or—or anything bad that one can think of. And one might want to give up being fond of him. But one wouldn't be able to. I shouldn't."
"Ah, well, there's just the difference between you and I," said Miss Million, in such a brisk, practical, matter-of-fact voice that one could hardly realise that it belonged to the girl whose eyes had grown so dreamy as she had spoken, only yesterday, of the Honourable Jim.
"Now, I'm like this. If I like a person, I like 'em. I'd stick to anybody through thick and thin. Do anything for 'em; work my fingers to the bone! But there's one thing they've got to do," said Miss Million impressively. "They've got to be straight with me. I've got to feel I can trust 'em, Smith. Once they've deceived me—it's all over. See?"
"Yes, I see," I said, feeling more puzzled than ever over the difference between one person's outlook and another's. As far as I was concerned, I felt that "trusting" and "liking" could be miles apart from each other.
I shouldn't change my whole opinion of a man because he had deceived me about knowing my uncle, and because he had spun me a lot of "yarns" about that friendship. Men were deceivers ever.
I, in Miss Million's place, should have shrugged my shoulders over the unmasking of this particular deceiver, and I should have said: "What can one expect of a man with that voice and those eyes?"
Evidently in this thing Million, whom I've tried to train in so many of the little ways that they consider "the mark of a lady," is more naturally fastidious than I am myself.
She said: "I don't mind telling you I thought a lot o' that Mr. Burke. I thought the world of him. But that's——"
She gave a sort of little scattering gesture with her hands.