"Poor little girl! After the beast in me dashed your card house to atoms you made another try—alone!" Raymond raised his face.
"No—I had Pat." At that instant Patricia symbolized the link between the unreal and the real.
"Yes, for a little while—but, Joan, it didn't pay—the danger you ran and all that—did it? Such girls as you cannot afford such experiences."
"Yes. Having had Pat, I am able to see—wider."
Joan was thinking of the girls whom Raymond could not have understood or sympathized with! Girls such as she might so easily have been like—unless—— Unless what?
"Joan, you and I always said we could speak plain truth, didn't we?" Kenneth's words brought her back.
"Of course!"
"Well," Raymond dropped his eyes and flushed, "you really didn't care—not in the one, particular way, did you? It was only play; you meant that?"
"It was only play, Ken. The suffering came because we did not know what we were playing with. It's the not knowing that matters."
"Joan, you have seen the worst in me——?"