"You don't know. Have you calculated the probable effect of gradual enlightenment on our friend's mind?"
"No. You are not a calculating woman. I just ask you to consider this point. I am not, as you know, in the least surprised at any of your charming little aberrations. But our friend Lucy has not had many surprises in his life. He'll come to you with an infinite capacity for astonishment. It's quite uncertain how he'll take--er--anything in the nature of a surprise. And, if you ask me, I should say he'd take it hard. Are you going to risk that?"
He was returning to his point even when he feigned to have lost sight of it. Tortured and panting she evaded it with pitiful subterfuges. He urged her back, pressing her tender breast against the prick of it.
"I'm going to risk everything," she said.
"Risk it, risk it, then. Tie yourself for life to a man you don't know; who doesn't really know you, though you think he does; who on your own showing wouldn't marry you if he did know. You see what a whopping big risk it is, for he's bound to know in the end."
She sickened and wearied. "He is not bound to know. Why is he?"
"Because, my dear girl, you're bound to give yourself away some day. I know you. I know the perverse little devil that is in you. When you realise what you've let yourself in for you'll break loose, suddenly--like that." He threw out his arms as if he burst bonds asunder. "You can't help yourself. You simply can't live the life. You may yearn for it, but you can't live it."
"I don't want to be respectable. It isn't that."
He looked at her closely, as if he saw it for the first time.
"Yes," she said. "You _won't_ tell him? It'll kill me if he knows."
"Oh no, you won't. You only think you will. It's Lucy I'm sorry for."
"And it's me you're hard on. You were always hard. You say you condone things, but you condone nothing, and you're not good yourself."
"No, I'm not good myself. But there is conduct and conduct. I can condone everything but the fraud you're practising on this innocent man." He rose. "It's--well--you see, it's such a beastly shame."
It was to be a battle of brains, and she had foiled him with the indomitable stupidity of her passion. But his point--the one point that he stuck to--was a sword point for her passion.