"But we've not," Guy contradicted, mustering desperately all the forces of normality to allay Pauline's overstrained ideas. "We've not," he repeated. "You don't understand, darling Pauline, that when you talk like that you give the impression of something that is unimaginable of you. It's dreadful really to have to talk about this, but it's better that we should discuss it than that you should torture yourself needlessly like this."
"It's not what we've done so much," she said. "It's what you've made me think about you."
Guy laughed rather miserably.
"That seems a very trifling reason for so much ... well, you know, it's very nearly hysteria."
"To you, perhaps," she retorted bitterly. "To me it's like madness."
"I can't understand these morbid fancies of yours. What have you been doing in Oxford? Ah, I know," he shouted in a rage of sudden divination. "You've been talking to a priest.... Oh, if I could burn every interfering scoundrel who...." The scene swept over him, choking the words in his throat with indignant impotent jealousy. "You've been to Confession. And what good have you got from it, but lies, lies?"
"I've always been to Confession," Pauline answered coldly.
In a flash Guy visualized her religious life as one long creeping toward a gloomy Confessional where lurked a smooth-faced priest who poured his poison into her ears.
"You shall go no more," he vowed. "What right have you to drag the holiness of love in the mud of a priest's mind?"
"You don't know how stupidly you're talking," said Pauline. "You say I exaggerate. You don't know how much you are exaggerating. You don't understand."