"Oh, now come!" he returned—and could go no further. Here was more of the unexpected: he was being put on the defensive!
"You've been a soldier," she went on; "you've seen a lot of the world before you met me. But you didn't recite anything you'd done. You expected me to take you 'as is,' and I thought, naturally enough, that that was the way you meant to take me."
"But I don't see why a girl should know about matters in which she is not concerned—which were a part of a man's past."
"Exactly. And that's just the way I felt about matters in which you were not concerned. But—I was wrong, wasn't I? You're not an American. You're a European. And you have the Continental attitude toward women—proprietorship, and so on."
He stared. He had never heard her talk like this before. "Ah, um," he murmured, still worrying the mustache. She was using no slang, and that "Continental attitude"—his glance said, "Where did you come by that?"
"I've known all along that you had the Old World bias—the idea that it is justice for the Pot to call the Kettle black—the idea that a man can do anything, but that a woman is lost forever if she happens to make one mistake. That all belongs, of course, right back where you came from. No doubt your mother taught——"
"Please leave my mother out of this discussion!" Here was something he could say with great severity and dignity—something that would imply the contrast between what Clare Crosby stood for and the high standards of his mother, whose fame might not be tarnished even through the mention of her name by a culpable woman.
Clare laughed. "Early Victorian," she commented, cheerfully; "that do-not-sully-the-fair-name-of-mother business. It's in your blood, Felix,—along with the determination you feel never to change when once you've made up your mind, as if your mind were something that has set itself solid, as metal does when it's run into a mold."
"Oh, indeed! Just like that!"
She nodded. "Precisely. And when you make up your mind that someone is wrong, or has hurt your vanity (which is worse), you are just middle-class enough to love to swing a whip."