I said, “what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly that there is another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I say, dirty. It didn't seem so at first—”
I stopped blankly. “Dirty,” I thought, was the most idiotic choice of words to have made.
I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
“I drifted into this—as men do,” I said after a little pause and stopped again.
She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
“Did you imagine,” she began, “that I thought you—that I expected—”
“But how can you know?”
“I know. I do know.”
“But—” I began.
“I know,” she persisted, dropping her eyelids. “Of course I know,” and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not know.
“All men—” she generalised. “A woman does not understand these temptations.”
I was astonished beyond measure at her way