"Your ideas of life and of men are like a cloistered nun's," said I. "If
there are any real men among your acquaintances, you may find out some
day that they're not so much like lapdogs as they pretend--and that you
wouldn't like them, if they were."
"What--just what--happened to you down town to-day--after you left me?"
"A friend of mine has been luring me into a trap--why, I can't quite
fathom. To-day he sprang the trap and ran away."
"A friend of yours?"
"The man we were talking about--your ex-god--Langdon."
"Langdon," she repeated, and her tone told me that Sammy knew and had
hinted to her more than I suspected him of knowing. And, with her arms
still folded, she paced up and down the room. I watched her slender feet in
pale blue slippers appear and disappear--first one, then the other--at the
edge of her trailing skirt.
Presently she stopped in front of me. Her eyes were gazing past me.
"You are sure it was he?" she asked.
I could not answer immediately, so amazed was I at her expression. I had
been regarding her as a being above and apart, an incarnation of youth
and innocence; with a shock it now came to me that she was experienced,
intelligent, that she understood the whole of life, the dark as fully as
the light, and that she was capable to live it, too.
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