Then he sat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes.
"This is going to hurt you," he said, "but you've asked for the truth, and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you'd better have it, naked and undisguised.

In any case, you're one of the women who always gets hurt and always thrives on it.

You're too earnest and sincere to be able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call life, aren't you ?" "Yes, Gilbert," she answered, with the look of one who had been placed in front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes.
There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the everlasting drumming of the sea.
"One night, in Paris, when I was towering on the false confidence of twenty-one,"-- curious how, even at that moment, he spoke with a certain self-consciousness,--"I came out of the Moulin Rouge alone and walked back to the Maurice.

It was the first time I'd ever been on the other side, and I was doing it all in the usual way of the precocious undergraduate.

But the 'gay Paree' stuff that was specially manufactured to catch the superfluous francs of the pornographic tourist and isn't really in the least French, bored me, almost at once.
And that night, going slowly to the hotel, sickened by painted women, chypre and raw champagne I turned a mental somersault and built up a picture of what I hoped I should find in life.