Alexandra was in the act of writing a letter. She looked up apathetically.
"You mean the man I was with last night?" she said. "I'm not going to see him any more, so we won't talk about him."
"Oh, yes, we will! Why, I do believe you're writing to him now!"
"You can read what I've written."
Thus invited, Maggy looked over her shoulder. Alexandra had begun a stilted little note to Bernard Meer in which she briefly refused to meet him any more.
"I don't think you'll post it," said Maggy shrewdly. "It doesn't ring true. Besides, what do you want to run away from him for? He looked just the sort of man one could trust, not a bit like the stage-door pest kind."
She cross-examined Alexandra, dragged from her the few bald details of her half-dozen meetings with Meer.
"Of course you're in love with him," she declared. "I saw it in your face. If I hadn't been so taken up with Fred I should have found out things before last night. Lexie, what's going to happen?"
The tone in which Maggy asked the question showed that she expected a particular answer, that she would be surprised if it were not the one which followed the line of least resistance. It set Alexandra wavering.
"Oh, Maggy," she said desperately, "if any one had told me a few months ago that I should ever have had to fight against that sort of temptation I should have died of shame! All last night I lay awake hating and despising myself, and all the time I was trying to find excuses for myself. I never thought love would come like this, taking one unawares, giving one no time to prepare for it. If I ever let myself think of it at all it was as of some fragrant and beautiful little plant that one could watch shoot and grow and bud—"