He waited long; she did not speak.
"You feel, I suppose," he said gently, "that you've forfeited the right to speak."
She did not venture to contradict him. Anything she would say, however guarded, might anger him—and Winchie was at stake.
"As I told you last night, I know you are somehow not a bad woman. Until yesterday, I'd have said there were just two classes of women—the good and the bad. But I'd also have said that I'd have killed both you and him. I find I've got to revise many ideas I had. Just how, I don't know. I'm realizing in regard to my grandfather what I've long realized about everything else—that nothing from the past is trustworthy. The wisdom of yesterday is the folly of to-day." He roused himself from his half abstraction, said, "So—you need not be afraid to speak out whatever is in your mind."
On impulse of response to this breadth—an impulse that was yet, perhaps, not without quick feminine wit to see and seize advantage—she said, "You make me feel that I can trust to your sense of justice."
He smiled satirically. "I see you still don't understand. You fancy I'm more than human because I don't act as if I were less than human. I know you are a woman, but women have been given mind enough to distinguish between right and wrong, between honor and dishonor. And— Is it necessary that I give its plain name to what you've done—to what you are?"
"No," she said in a suffocating voice. Only her boy was saving her from bursting out.
"Then—don't try to cajole me with talk about my sense of justice. What do you ask?"
All in an instant—whether because her natural bent was for the frank and courageous or because instinct told her it was the only hopeful course with him—she resolved to act as she felt, to speak her thoughts. "What do I ask?" she repeated. "First, that you stop posing."
He flushed.