ve. "I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully, an
odd note for a man's victim! And, "we've had a good time. You have liked
me, haven't you?"

She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless and
had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a rich
meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--"he reeks of it," she said,
"always"--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards (which he played
very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free Masonry and Stock Exchange
punting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had contrived
her marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples I ever
encountered of the great multitude of functionless property owners which
encumbers modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much of
that aspect of them....

I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I
have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather than
wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those
furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been
more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I had
been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course--finding
myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom
of my innocence, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And here
is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was
over-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt
I had been promoted to virility; I was unable to conceal my exultation
from Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious
self-approval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by
the rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between
us.

"You know?" I said abruptly,--"about that woman?"

Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner
of his spectacles.

"Things went pretty far?" he asked.

"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my
unpremeditated achievement.

"She came to your room?"

I nodded.

"I heard her. I heard her whispering.... The whispering and rustling and
so on. I was in my room yesterday.... Any one might have heard you."

I went on with my head in the air.

"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble.
You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What did you know
about her?.