"You'll be spilling ash all over the bed. Here's an ash-tray." She guided his hand. "Then you don't want absolution?"
"Oh, yes, I do! But, you see, I'm not yet in articulo mortis, so I'll put off my confession."
"Anyhow, you loved the woman you treated badly?" The question was as casual as she could make it, while she settled the tea-things on the tray.
"It was a girl, not a woman."
"What has become of her?"
"That's what I should like to know."
"But you loved her?"
"Of course I did! I'm not a blackguard. Of course I loved her." Her pulses quickened. "But much water has run under London Bridge since then."
"And much blood has flowed in France."
"Everything—lives, habits, modes of thought have been revolutionized. Yes"—he reflected for a moment—"it's odd how you have brought back old days. I fell in with a pestilential, so-called artistic crowd—I am an architect by profession—you know, men with long greasy hair and dirty finger nails and anarchical views. There was one chap especially, who I thought was decadent to the bone. Aloysius Eglington, he called himself." The man sprang vivid to her memory; he had once tried to make love to her. "Well, I came across him the other day with a couple of wound-stripes and the military-cross ribbon. For a man like that, what an upheaval!" He laughed again. "I suppose I've been a bit upheaved myself."