She pushed her plate away as if ready to go.
“Wait a minute,” he pleaded. “It doesn’t seem like you to go off and leave a man in the dark. How in thunder am I going to know any better next time if you don’t tell me where I made the break?”
“I don’t believe you’d know if I did tell you,” she answered more gently.
“The least you can do is to try.”
She did not want to tell him. If he was sincere––and the longer she talked with him, the more convinced she was that this was the case––then she did not wish to disillusionize him.
“The least you can do is to give me a chance,” he persisted.
“The mistake came in the beginning, Mr. Pendleton,” she said, with an effort. “And it was all my fault. You––you seemed so different from a lot of men who come into the 96 office that I––well, I wanted to see you get started straight. In the three years I’ve been there I’ve picked up a lot of facts that aren’t much use to me because––because I’m just Miss Winthrop. So I thought I could pass them on.”
“That was mighty white of you,” he nodded.
The color flashed into her cheeks.
“I thought I could do that much without interfering in any other way with either of our lives.”