"That isn't just," he said quietly. "I wouldn't lie to you, not even to get you. If that's the way you feel about me, I reckon there couldn't, after all, be much between us. I've got all the sins and faults of the world, but not just that one. I don't lie."
"Then tell me."
"No. You've not earned it. What would be the use, if you didn't believe what I said?"
He held up the faded things before his eyes, turning them over calmly, looking at them directly, unshrinkingly. She could not read what was in his mind. Either he had courage or long accustomedness, she thought.
"I asked Sally," she half smiled.
"Yes?"
"And I'll ask her again. I don't want—I can't have, a—a room which belongs to another woman, which has belonged to another. I've not, all my life, been used to—that sort of place, myself, you see."
"You are entitled to first place. Madam, wherever you are. I don't know what you have been." He pointed to her own garments, which lay across a chair. "You don't know what she has been;" he indicated these that he held in his hand. "Very well. What could a mere liar, a coward, do to arrange an understanding between two women so mysterious? You sprang from the earth, from the sea, somewhere, I do not know how. You are the first woman for me. Is it not enough?"
"I told Sally, it might have been a sister, your mother—"
"Dead long ago. Out there." He nodded to the window.