"How do you know that I am not a man in disguise?" came a voice from the darkness; and it seemed to me, not for the first time, that she was amused at something. "I'm tall enough. Just think how stupendous it would be if, when I was inside and the door really locked, I proved to be a wicked, devastating, burglarious male."
"I wish you would not say things like that," I said. "On your honour, are you a man?"
She hesitated, and then said in a changed voice:
"I am not. I don't know what I am. I was a woman once, just as a derelict was a ship once. But whatever I am, I am not fit to come into a self-respecting house. I am one solid cake of mud."
Something in her reluctance made me the more determined. Besides, one of the truths on which I have insisted most strongly in my "Veil of the Temple" is that if we show full trust and confidence in others, they will prove worthy of that trust. Her coming indoors had now become a matter of principle, and I insisted. I even said I could lend her a dressing-gown and slippers, so that her wet clothes might be dried by the kitchen fire.
She murmured something about a good Samaritan, but still demurred, and asked if I had a bath-room. I said I had.
That decided her. She seemed to have no difficulty in making up her mind. She did not see two sides to things, as I always do myself.
She said that if I liked to allow her to go to the bath-room first, she should be happy to accept my kind invitation for an hour or so. If not, she would stay where she was.
Half an hour later she was sitting opposite me in the parlour, on the other side of the wood fire, sipping her coffee. I had not put down the brown paper or the mackintosh. It was not necessary. Her close-cropped, curly grey hair, still damp from the bath, was parted, and brushed stiffly back over her ears. It must have been very beautiful hair once. Her thin hands and thinner face and neck looked more like brown parchment than ever, as she sat in the lamplight, my old blue dressing-gown folded negligently round her, and taking picturesque folds which it never did when I was inside it. Those long, gaunt limbs must have been graceful once. Her feet were bare in her slippers—in my slippers, I mean. She looked rather like a well-bred Indian.