Strawbridge had an uncomfortable feeling that his face was growing hot.
"They were not the sort you seduce," he accented in annoyance; "they were the sort you pay. I wouldn't seduce any girl who ... who was a virgin. That ... that would be a little too bad."
He was trembling internally. Under the priest's questioning there gradually compiled within him a sense of guilt. It was an extraordinary feeling. For years at a stretch he had never once thought of his goodness or his badness. Now, in Strawbridge's ache for the señora, the priest brought up this utterly irrelevant and painful experience. The ascetic, however, continued to regard the drummer gravely.
"It seems to me, my son, if you thought your acts were harmless heretofore, yet surely, in the light of your affection for Doña Dolores Fombombo, you must see that you have lived sinfully. Do you not know that at heart these women whom you paid were much like the señora, only they were weaker, and tread bitterer paths? Is there any real difference between giving a woman her first stain, and giving her the last pollution that destroys her! If you can imagine the señora flung about the streets, defiled, mocked, and paid for, do you think she would be any more pitiful than any other woman? A human soul is a human soul, my dear son."
A distressful feeling arose in Strawbridge at this renaissance of his transgressions. For some reason the priest's words aroused with painful distinctness the memory of his first impurity. It had been with a hoyden, boyish girl with whom he had been skating at dusk on the cement walks in the park. He recalled the heavy syringa bushes, and how suddenly she had begun to cry, and how frightened and ashamed he had been. He remembered how he took off his skates because they made too much noise, and hurried silently home by back alleys, under a profound sense of shame and guilt. And that girl had been a virgin. He had deceived the priest. Now, as he sat on his bed in the cubicle, he felt a renewal of all the shame and guiltiness occasioned by that distant act of his boyhood. He wondered fearfully what had become of Daisy. He could see her distinctly, sitting on the grass, twisting her hands together and sobbing heartbrokenly for the evil which had befallen her.
Father Benicio stood watching his face during these melancholy memories.
"When you reflect on these transgressions, my son, then you will thank God a hundred times that you escaped leading the woman you love into a life of adultery."
"But, Father," asked Strawbridge, unsteadily, "what is going to become of her!"
"What do you mean!"
"I mean, in this land of murder and crime what will become of Dolores?"