“I believe we’re two of a kind,” he told her, with a real little flare of daring. There seemed a curious romantic gleam in the situation. “I’ve had my flings and learned my lessons,” he admitted.
She mused. “Yes. Still, it’s perhaps best to rap on wood, don’t you think?”
Jerome made a careless gesture. “Oh, I’m not worried.”
“Still,” she went on in her utterly unmoved way, “the world is a swarm of temptations, and the man who feels most secure is usually just the one to be twisted round some woman’s finger—or vice versa, of course. You understand.”
“Yes, I understand.”
In fact, they both understood. And in fact it seemed to them as they talked that there was rather a good deal of common ground. It was not an unpleasant discovery.
“I’d always said,” she went on, “I’d had my flings and learned my lessons too. But I’m not superstitious, and I never rapped on wood. Well,” she smiled, her brown eyes drooping a little more, “it would have been better if I had. For I was taken in, after all. I almost reached the point of parroting ‘I do’ in the presence of a rector. But I escaped in time, which is something,” she ended seriously, her wise young mouth taking on a singularly compact look.
He would have preferred, and really very much preferred, remaining unenmeshed in Elsa Utterbourne’s eyes. But it occurred to him that candour, in a case of this sort, might be the wisest course. Her own passionless frankness encouraged him, and he muttered: “I was taken in, too. But with me the case went a little harder.”
“How?”
“Well, I didn’t escape in time—that’s all.”