"Nor I. I thought I had. Until I saw you again. I've thought of you endlessly. I've wanted to talk to you. We had a way of talking together. But you went away. You turned your back as though all that was nothing—not worth having. You—you drove home my marriage, Stephen. You made me know what a thing of sex a woman is to a man—and how little else...."
She paused.
"You see," I said slowly. "You had made me, as people say, in love with you.... I don't know—if you remember everything...."
She looked me in the eyes for a moment.
"I hadn't been fair," she said with an abrupt abandonment of accusation. "But you know, Stephen, that night—— I meant to explain. And afterwards.... Things sometimes go as one hasn't expected them to go, even the things one has planned to say. I suppose—I treated you—disgustingly."
I protested.
"Yes," she said. "I treated you as I did—and I thought you would stand it. I knew, I knew then as well as you do now that male to my female you wouldn't stand it, but somehow—I thought there were other things. Things that could override that...."
"Not," I said, "for a boy of one-and-twenty."
"But in a man of twenty-six?"