“‘I had looked at you. Stopped and looked. It was a sin. After that, I could not be allowed to live with those who were not sinners,’ she explained.
“‘I never heard of such a thing!’ he told her. ‘Are they crazy?’
“‘The signs tell you. It is their belief. It was a sin to have looked at you—and remembered.’
“Eric’s blood was racing; she had remembered! Looked at him, and remembered.
“‘Don’t worry. Just tell me,’ he urged.
“She told him. He did not tell me just what she said, but I could guess as I watched the light back in his eyes. Her father had opened the door and put her out in the rain as a wanton. He was very strict—father. As soon as the rain was over she would go to the other end of town where she had a friend who would take her in. No, she did not believe as her father and the people of the town believed; her mother had taken her away and she had been brought up differently, but when the mother had died, he had brought her back.
“‘My mother could not bear it here,’ she said. ‘I am not so brave as she, or I would go.’”
“Go on,” said Janet again.
“It’s a good story, isn’t it? Especially since we have our own opinions concerning him. No king of lovers, no Romeo, no schoolboy, could have told such a tale of first love as Eric told me. Spilled it out. Words tumbling over each other.
“In one look, in one half hour, it seemed, he had turned over all the principles upon which we live here in New York. The primal had taken him—and her, too. She was not afraid; not frightened at what she must have seen in him.