"Like a woman, you resent a half-confidence."
She drew in a sharp little breath. The words, the tone, stabbed her. She might have been talking to him in one of their pleasanter hours in the Chelsea flat. In spite of her burning curiosity, she said, "I'm not a woman; I'm a nurse."
"Since when?"
"As far as you people are concerned, since September, '14, when I went out to France. I've been through everything—from the firing-line field-ambulances, casualty clearing-stations, base hospitals—and now I'm here having a rest-cure. Hundreds and hundreds of men have told me their troubles—so I've got to regard myself as a sort of mother confessor."
He smiled.
"Then, like a mother confessor, you resent a half-confidence?"
She put a cigarette between his lips and lit it for him.
"It all depends," she said lightly, "whether you want absolution or not. I suppose it's the same old story." She held her voice in command. "Every man thinks it's original. What kind of a woman was she?"
He parried the thrust.
"Isn't that rather too direct a question, even for a mother confessor?"