so adorable...."

Pauline seemed to cry out at the wound he had given her, and Guy started
back, afraid for an instant of what he was provoking.

"Don't treat me like a stupid little girl that petting can cure. I'm not
adorable, I'm bad.... I'm ... oh, Guy, I am so unhappy!"

"What do you mean by 'bad'?" he asked. "You talk as if we were....
Really, darling, you don't grasp life at all."

"Guy," she said, turning to him with fierce earnestness, "don't persuade
me I've done nothing. I have. I ought not. I've known that all the time.
If you don't want me to be miserable for the rest of my life, you
mustn't persuade me. I've been so weak...."

He was annoyed at the exaggeration in her words and perplexed by her
violence.

"Anybody would think, you know," he told her, "that we have behaved
terribly."

"We have. We have."

Her mouth was drawn with pain; her eyes were wild.

"But we've not," Guy contradicted, mustering desperately all the forces
of normality to allay Pauline's over-strained ideas. "We've not," he
repeated. "You don't understand, darling Pauline, that when you talk
like that you give the impression of something that is unimaginable of
you. It's dreadful to have to talk about this, but it's better that we
should discuss it than that you should torture yourself needlessly like
this."

"It's not what we've done so much," she said. "It's what you've made me
think about you."

Guy laughed rather miserably.

"That seems a very trifling reason for so much ... well, you know, it's
very nearly hysteria."

"To you, perhaps," she retorted, bitterly. "To me it's like madness."

"I can't understand these morbid fancies of yours. What have you been
doing in Oxford? Ah, I know," he shouted, in a rage of sudden
divination. "You've been talking to a priest.... Oh, if I could burn
every interfering scoundrel who...." The scene swept over him, choking
the words in his throat with indignant impotent jealousy. "You've been
to Confession. And what good have you got from it, but lies, lies?"

"I've always been to Confession," Pauline answered, coldly.

In a flash Guy visualized her religious life as one long creeping
towards a gloomy Confessional, where lurked a smooth-faced priest who
poured his poison into her ears.

"You shall go no more," he vowed. "What right have you to drag the
holiness of love in the mud of a priest's mind?"

"You don't know how stupidly you're talking," said Pauline. "You say I
exa