"Then, I suppose, it's virtue that you are after," he remarked.
She looked gravely up at him before she bowed her head in assent. "I like virtue," she responded quietly. "Don't you?"
"God knows, I do," he replied without hesitation in the grandiloquent tone he loved to assume upon occasions. "But do you think," he added presently, "that a man can acquire virtue unless it has been born in him?"
"I think it is another name for wisdom," she replied, "and that is often found late and in hard places."
He looked at her with an attention which had become absorbed, exclusive. "Do you know, I thought virtue was what women didn't care about in men?" he said, and his voice was tense with curiosity.
"Perhaps you mistake the conventions for virtue," she rejoined; "men usually do." Then after a moment she added frankly, "But I know very little of what women like or don't like. I've never really known but two besides my aunts—and one of these is Gerty."
"And you are very fond of Gerty?" he enquired.
As she looked up at him it seemed to him that her smile was a miracle of light. "I love her more than anyone in the whole world," she said.
Again she perplexed him, and with each fresh perplexity he was conscious of an increasing desire to understand. "But I thought all women hated one another," he observed.
"That's because men have ruled the world in two ways," she returned, and her protest was not without a smothered indignation; "they have made the laws and they have made the jokes."