"No. I don't want to see him."
"Bryan, since we're to be married, I think I'd best tell you what I wouldn't tell that night at Mount Street. Do you remember?"
"Yes. Well?"
"Dear, there's no reason, when you see him, you should feel anything but just a great, deep pity for all his unhappiness. I don't know why I didn't tell you this before. I think it was your doubting him drove me mad. And you're quite right in saying I've changed myself on purpose. It was because, after I learned the world a bit, I saw what a fraud I really was. All those little girl's ways you liked so much—they're very pretty, I dare say, but they're shams for me, anywhere off the stage. I had no right to them. I'm only what the world calls a 'good girl'—I'm only a girl at all, because he was merciful and—spared me. He must have been a very good man."
"Or a very cold one? Which?"
"Well. I'm not going to try to answer that, Bryan. It's what you call yourself an 'unseemly question'."
"You're a strange creature."
"Oh no, I'm not, Bryan. Not a bit different really to heaps and heaps of other women. I used to think I was once, at Sharland, because I didn't seem to have the other girls' ways or their curiosity. But I know better now. Do you remember Lord—the old lawyer beast that we went to the White City with? He took me on the launches, and when we were alone, he leaned over and told me—oh, something I can't even tell you, Bryan—now. He said it in French first and then, in case I didn't know what it was in French, he translated it into English. Those are the things that make us loathe you, Bryan—deep, deep, deep, down in the little bit of us you never reach. But I only giggled, as any other girl would have done, any other girl who felt the same as me. And now he'll always remember me as—the woman who laughed."
"You're all a mystery."
"Not half as much as is pretended, Bryan. The mystery comes about because we don't tell the truth. Married women don't tell it, even, to one another, and it's thought shocking to tell a girl things that the first man she meets will tell her if she lets him. I hear more than most, 'cos I'm not one thing nor the other, and every one thinks I'll tell them things back, and then they'll find out what's puzzling them about us two. And we never tell you. How dare we? We find a set of rules ready made for us—by you. You take the men we really want from us because you're stronger than they are, or richer, or even braver than they are, and since it's the way you settle things among yourselves, and since you're satisfied with what you get by it, we pretend we're satisfied too. But it's one thing to conquer them, Bryan, and it's another thing to conquer us. I'll tell you a little woman's secret: No nice girl ever gives herself up quite to a man unless there's a little of her mother in him. There was an awful lot in Paul. I found it out."