"Don't be obvious!"
"Last night? Annoyed? I was tired. In a talky mood. It was my guest's own idea to come down. I said sure—and after she'd been there awhile—I changed my mind."
"That's what Gwen thought." She ate a little of her fruit salad. Maybe her hand shook. Certainly not much. She drew a straight, easy breath. "I imagined I could learn something from her."
"Did you?"
She looked at me with frank, gray eyes. She smiled into herself. "You know I did."
"What?"
"Isn't it strange how much we attach to trifles—love and sex trifles? Set up a whole lifetime for happiness—but fix it so that one little act for a handful of minutes will ruin the whole thing."
"That."
She flicked her head to put back her hair. "It's mad! To imagine such things are so important! To imagine whole lives and people and families can be ruined by anything—so little!"
I gave her the red schoolhouse riposte. "Knocking a person on the head is a little thing that hardly takes even one minute. But it's murder. Slipping a hundred G's out of the cash cage takes only a sec—but it's robbery—"