"It is enough for you to know."
He looked her hard in the eyes. "Perhaps," he said in a low voice, "I know more about you than you imagine I do, Geraldine—since last April."
She felt the blood leave her face, the tension crisping her muscles; she sat up very straight and slender among the cushions and defied him.
"What do you—think you know?" she tried to sneer, but her voice shook and failed.
He said: "I'll tell you. For one thing, you're playing fast and loose with Dysart. He's a safe enough proposition—but what is that sort of thing going to arouse in you?"
"What do you mean?" Her voice cleared with an immense relief. He noted it.
"It's making you tolerant," he said quietly, "familiar with subtleties, contemptuous of standards. It's rubbing the bloom off you. You let a man who is married come too close to you—you betray enough curiosity concerning him to do it. A drifting woman does that sort of thing, but why do you cut your cables? Good Lord, Geraldine, it's a fool business—permitting a man an intimacy——"
"More harmless than his wife permits you!" she retorted.
"That is not true."
"You are supposed to lie about such things, aren't you?" she said, reddening to the temples. "Oh, I am learning your rotten code, you see—the code of all these amiable people about me. You've done your part to instruct me that promiscuous caresses are men's distraction from ennui; Rosalie evidently is in sympathy with that form of amusement—many men and women among whom I live in town seem to be quite as casual as you are.... I did have standards once, scarcely knowing what they meant; I clung to them out of instinct. And when I went out into the world I found nobody paying any attention to them."