“When I was a small child,” said Corinna, “I used to take the Ten Commandments one by one and secretly break them, just to see what would happen. Some I didn’t know how to break—the seventh for instance, which worried me—and others referring to stealing and murder were rather too stiff propositions. But I chipped out with a nail on a tile a little graven image and I bowed down and worshipped it in great excitement; and as father used to tell us that the third commandment included all kinds of swearing, I used to bend over an old well we had in the garden and whisper ‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn,’ until the awful joy of it made my flesh creep. I think, Martin, you can’t be more than ten years old.”
“Why do you spoil a bit of sympathetic comprehension by that last remark?” he asked.
“Why do you jib at truth?” she retorted.
“Truth?”
“Aren’t you like a child revelling in naughtiness—naughtiness just for the sake of being naughty?”
“Perhaps I am,” said he. “But why do you mock at me for it?”
“I don’t think I’m mocking,” she answered more seriously. “When I said you were only ten years old I meant to be rather affectionate. I seem to be ever so old in experience, and you never to have grown up. You’re so refreshing after all these people I’ve been mixed up with—mostly lots younger really than you—who have plumbed the depths of human knowledge and have fished up the dregs and holding them out in their hands say, ‘See what it all comes to!’ I’m dead sick of them. So to consort, as I’ve been doing, with an ingenuous mind like yours, is a real pleasure.”
Martin rose from his seat and a tortoiseshell cat, the only other denizen of the market-place, startled from intimate ablutions, gazed at him, still poising a forward thrown hind leg.
“My dear Corinna,” said he, “I would beg you to believe that I’m not so damned ingenuous as all that!”
For reply Corinna laughed out loud, whereupon the cat fled. She rose too.