"Do you mean to say," she complained, "that you expect me to minister to your wants in here? What will Miss Smithson say, what will the dear children say in their weekly letters home? You don't really mean it?"
"On the contrary," he replied, placidly, "I am going to take you out to lunch in the most improper restaurant this improper city can produce. So go and put on that Parisian hat of yours, and be as quick as you like about it. I am rather hungry, too."
"You really seem to forget," she said, "that I am the respectable head of a high-class seminary for—"
"I only wish you would allow me to forget it," he interrupted. "It is just because you have been occupying yourself for a whole year, and with the most lamentable success, in growing elderly and respectable, that I intend to give you this opportunity of being regenerated. May I ask what you are waiting for, now?"
"I am waiting for some of the conventional dogma you used to preach to me in the days when I wanted to be improper," she retorted. "It would really save a great deal of trouble if our respective moral codes could be induced to coincide sometimes, wouldn't it?"
"It would save a great deal of trouble if you were to do as you are told, without talking quite so much about it. It is now half-past—"
"I tell you it is impossible," she protested. "You must have your déjeûner here, with unsophistication twenty-five strong—and Miss Smithson. What is the use of my having acquired a position of importance if I deliberately throw it away again by behaving like an improper schoolgirl?"
"What is the use of a position at all," replied Paul, "if it doesn't enable you to be improper when you choose? Don't you think we might consider the argument at an end? I am quite willing to concede to Miss Smithson, or to any other person in authority, that you have made all the objections necessary to the foolish possessor of a conscience, if you will only go and tell her that you do not intend to be in to lunch."
"I have told her," said Katharine inadvertently, and then laughed frankly at her own admission. "I always spoil all my deceptions by being truthful again too soon," she added plaintively.
"Women always spoil their vices by incompletion," observed Paul. "They have reduced virtue to an art, but there is a crudity about their vice that always gives them away sooner or later. That is why they are so easily found out; it is not because they are worse than men, but because they are better. They repent too soon, and your sins always find you out when you begin to repent."