u see, I was brought up very carefully."

"Were you?"

"Yes. I'm not sure that it's wise to be as careful as all that--to keep
young girls in ignorance of things they--things they must, sooner or
later----" she paused staring as if at an abyss.

"What things?" asked Jane bluntly.

"I don't know what things. I don't _know_ anything. I'm afraid. I'm so
innocent, Miss Lucy, that I'm like a child in the dark. I think I want
some one to hold my hand and tell me there's nothing there."

"Perhaps there isn't."

"Yes, but it's so dark that I can't see whether there is or isn't. I'm
just like a little child. Except that it imagines things and I don't."

"Don't you? Are you sure you don't let your imagination run away with
you sometimes?"

"Not," said Miss Keating, "not on this subject. Even when I'm brought
into contact"--her shoulder-blades obeyed the suggestion of her brain,
and shuddered. "I don't know whether it's good or bad to refuse to face
things. I can't help it. All that side of life is so intensely
disagreeable to me."

"It's not agreeable to me," said Jane. "And what _has_ it got to do with
Mrs. Tailleur?"

Miss Keating smiled queerly. "I don't know. I wish I did."

"If you mean you think she isn't nice, I can tell you I'm sure you're
mistaken."

"It's not what _I_ think. It's what other people think."

"What people?"

"The people here."

Little Jane lifted her head superbly.

"_We_ think the people here have behaved abominably to Mrs. Tailleur."

She lifted her voice too. She didn't care who heard her. She rose,
making herself look as tall as possible.

"And if you're her friend," said she, "you ought to think so too."

She walked out of the room, still superbly. Miss Keating was left to a
painful meditation on misplaced confidence.

CHAPTER VII

She had had no intention of betraying Kitty. Kitty, she imagined, had
sufficiently betrayed herself. And if she hadn't, as long as Kitty chose
to behave like a dubious person, she could hardly be surprised if
persons by no means dubious refused to be compromised. She, Miss
Keating, was in no way responsible for Kitty Tailleur. Neither was she
responsible for what other people thought of her. That was all, in
effect, that she had intimated to Miss Lucy.

She did not say what she herself precisely thought, nor when she had
first felt that uncomfortable sensation of exposure, that little shiver
of cold and shame that seized her when in Kitt