"I want to.... Do you know this is the first time?"
"Is it?"
"The first time I have ever spoken of it to anybody.... As long as my mother lived I did not once speak of it to her."
She rested in silence for a while, then:
"Could I tell you?"
"My dear, my dear!—of course you can."
"I—it's been unsaid so long—there was nobody to tell it to. I've done my best to forget it—and for days I seem to forget it. But sometimes when I wake at night it is there—the horror of it—the terror sinking deeper into my breast.... I was very young. You knew that?"
"Yes."
"You knew my mother had very slender means?"
"Yes."