In the moment of silence which followed, Paula was hoping with all her might—that this was the end.
"Oh, I know what you're thinking!" Selma said suddenly. "He has fascinated you, and you can't see that he's a rotten cad—from what I've said so far. A woman can never see the meanness of a man from another woman's experience with him. She forgives him for calling forth all another woman has—and then shaking her loose like a soiled bath-robe when one's tub is ready. But it's different when she's the discarded woman!... He was so deep, I can't believe he didn't know that episodes were new to me. Likely, he's had so many around the world, that he can't take them more seriously from the woman's angle—than from his own.... Quentin Charter was the first man to arouse all my dreams. Can't you see how it hurt when he turned out to be—well, that name you refuse to utter?"
"Yes, of course, yes, but you suggest more, Selma!"
"He used me for 'copy,' as they call it. His article on the 'acting of stage-folk after hours,' appeared in a magazine a few weeks later. He's always a saint in his garret, you know. The article was filled with cutting cynicism about stage-matters, many of which he had discovered in the two weeks with me—and laughed over with his wine. I could have forgiven that, only he made me believe that there was not a thought apart from Selma Cross in his mind when we were together.... Oh, what's the use of me lying? I could have forgiven that, anyway!"
"What was it, you could not forgive?" Paula's face was bloodless.
"He told it all about—how easy I had proved in his hands!" the actress revealed with suppressed fury.
The other shrank back.
"That's where the expression comes in, Paula—the expression you hate. Drunk or sober—cad's the word. What a woman gives to a man is put in his inner vault forever. What she gives to a cad—is passed on to his friends."
Paula arose, tortured as if branded within. Here was a defection of character which an entire incarnation of purity could not make whole. It was true that in her heart, she had not been mortally stricken before; true, as Selma Cross had so bitterly declared, that a woman is not stayed from mating with a man because a sister has suffered at his hands.
"I have nothing to say about the word, if that is true." Paula spoke with difficulty, and in a hopeless tone.