"I saw myself face to face with the last fence, and baulked. I began backing out. There were soft places, I could not tell how deep or how soft, beyond, and I was nervous.
"'Come,' she urged, spurring with almost excited insistence, 'if you outline with the smallest correctness I will supply the lights and shades truthfully.'
"She said the last words with pathetic emphasis that frightened me.
"I determined to change the subject. Caught the little finger of her left hand and kissed it. Did I tell you she had never shaken hands with me with her right—that she had explained she kept it for secular and the other for sacred use? I kissed it, in the centre of her palm, and her body curled like a sensitive plant with the warmth of my lips. I blushed for having doubted her purity or her love."
He buried his head in his hands and seemed disinclined to reveal more. But after a long pause he began afresh.
"I'm telling you everything—exactly as it happened—that you may reverence her. She's too clean and transparent to be clouded by vulgar doubt," he said, rather to himself than to me.
"She insisted on my accompanying her to a sparsely-furnished room," he went on. "The walls were fitted with hooks and slides to improvise a wardrobe.
"'I have kept some of my gowns since I was a girl,' she sighed.
"'Those, I suppose, that were episodic?' I affected to laugh to waive her seriousness.
"'Oh, the everyday ones were thrown away—worn out: these were most of them connected with'—she hesitated—'eventful occasions.'