"Do you mean to tell me," he cried, sitting up, "that you don't think anything of those things?"
"Life can be so hard and cruel, can make one do so many——"
"But don't you realize that what you've done is the very worst thing a woman can do?"
"No," said she. "I don't. . . . I'm sorry you didn't understand. I thought you did—not the details, but in a general sort of way. I didn't mean to deceive you. That would have seemed to me much worse than anything I did."
"I might have known! I might have known!" he cried—rather theatrically, though sincerely withal—for Mr. Spenser was a diligent worker with the tools of the play-making trade. "I learned who you were as soon as I got home the night I left you in Carrolton. They had been telephoning about you to the village. So I knew about you."
"About my mother?" asked she. "Is that what you mean?"
"Oh, you need not look so ashamed," said he, graciously, pityingly.
"I am not ashamed," said she. But she did not tell him that her look came from an awful fear that he was about to make her ashamed of him.
"No, I suppose you aren't," he went on, incensed by this further evidence of her lack of a good woman's instincts. "I really ought not to blame you. You were born wrong—born with the moral sense left out."
"Yes, I suppose so," said she, wearily.