“Doing nicely.” He avoided the boy's eyes.
“I guess I'd better tell you. Dan's told me about her. I—” Joe hesitated. Then: “She never seemed like that sort of a girl,” he finished, bitterly.
“She isn't that sort of girl, Joe.”
“She did it. How could a fellow know she wouldn't do it again?”
“She has had a pretty sad sort of lesson.”
Joe, his real business forgotten, walked on with eyes down and shoulders drooping.
“I might as well finish with it,” he said, “now I've started. I've always been crazy about her. Of course now—I haven't slept for two nights.”
“I think it's rather like this, Joe,” Willy Cameron said, after a pause. “We are not one person, really. We are all two or three people, and all different. We are bad and good, depending on which of us is the strongest at the time, and now and then we pay so much for the bad we do that we bury that part. That's what has happened to Edith. Unless, of course,” he added, “we go on convincing her that she is still the thing she doesn't want to be.”
“I'd like to kill the man,” Joe said. But after a little, as they neared the edge of the park, he looked up.
“You mean, go on as if nothing had happened?”