hat you were doing
when you laid yourself out to be sweet and--and kind to a fellow, as
you were to me. Did you take me for an old maid or a Social Purity
Society? You know you didn't. A man does his best, but he's too heavily
handicapped--I won't say by nature--perhaps by habit, which is second
nature--the habit of generations, inherited in his blood--and his case
is not on all-fours with your case. And especially when he is a
sailor--so cut off--so deprived--Very well. And so it happened--as it
happened. Never mind about the right and wrong. What's wrong today may
be right tomorrow; and in any case, no arguing can undo what's done.
We'll leave that."

She sat before him, panting, and the roses in her cheeks were white.
Happily, the fire had grown a little dull by this time.

"For myself," he continued, speaking slowly, as if trying to think
things out--"for myself, whether I ought to repent or not, I don't--I
can't. Theoretically, I know it is always the man who is in the wrong,
and I should have been foully in the wrong--I should be unfit to
live--if you had been an unmarried girl, Francie--or if I had been
the--the--"

"Oh!" she moaned bitterly, grasping his point of view, if not the plain
justice of it. "But I have brought it on myself--I have only myself to
thank. I made myself cheap, and must take the consequences."

"It is not that," he said kindly, but still feeling in his
unsophisticated brain that it was. "I don't hold you cheap, my dear. I
want to disabuse your mind of that idea, that I am throwing anything in
your teeth. Good God, I should think not!--it would come ill from me. I
have no conventional views about these things--none. But look here now:
if you were my wife, I should never see you with another fellow without
thinking--well, you know what I should think--and feeling myself like
poor old Ewing--Oh, I AM a brute!" It was revealed to him all at once.
"Do--DO forgive me!"

"Pray don't apologise!" she cried, in a high, shaking voice. "It is
best, as you say, to speak plainly--not to mince matters--especially as
there is no one to call you to account for what you say."

"And it would be worse for you, ever so much," he continued earnestly.
"Having got into the way of--of this sort of thing--I'm afraid I might
be tempted again--that I couldn't honestly promise--in short, the fact
of the matter is that we are neither of us domesticated, so to speak--"

"There--that will do" she broke in, coldly