Yet, in spite of her worldly knowledge, she felt herself yielding to it as to a delicate flattery.

Her eyes were still on him, and presently he caught her gaze and held it by a look which, for all its fervour, had an edge of biting irony.

There was a meaning, a mystery in his regard, but his words when at last they came sounded almost empty.
"Oh, that's well enough in its way," he said, "but as a safeguard there's no virtue alive that can stand against a sense of humour.

An instinct for the ridiculous will keep any man from going to the devil." She shot her defiant merriment into his face.

"Has it kept you ?" "I ?--Oh, I wasn't bound that way, you know--but why do you ask ?" For a breath she hesitated, then, remembering her mystification of an instant ago, she felt a swift desire to punish him for something which even to herself she could not express--for too sharp a prick of unsatisfied curiosity, or was it for too intense a moment of uncertainty?
"Oh, one hears, you know," she replied indifferently.
"One hears! And what is it that one hears ?" His voice was hard, almost angry, and she despised herself because the fierce sound of it made her suddenly afraid.
"Do you know what a man said to me the other day," she went on with a cool insolence before which he became suddenly quiet.