mpossible any
allusion to truth!)

She smiled. "And I'd like to know, are you prepared to tell me
all--all I ought to know--about yourself?"

"Oh, now come!" he returned--and could go no further. Here was more of
the unexpected: he was being put on the defensive!

"You've been a soldier," she went on; "you've seen a lot of the world
before you met me. But you didn't recite anything you'd done. You
expected me to take you 'as is,' and I thought, naturally enough, that
that was the way you meant to take me."

"But I don't see why a girl should know about matters in which she is
not concerned--which were a part of a man's past."

"Exactly. And that's just the way I felt about matters in which you
were not concerned. But--I was wrong, wasn't I? You're not an
American. You're a European. And you have the Continental attitude
toward women--proprietorship, and so on."

He stared. He had never heard her talk like this before. "Ah, um," he
murmured, still worrying the mustache. She was using no slang, and
that "Continental attitude"--his glance said, "Where did you come by
_that_?"

"I've known all along that you had the Old World bias--the idea that it
is justice for the Pot to call the Kettle black--the idea that a man
can do anything, but that a woman is lost forever if she happens to
make one mistake. That all belongs, of course, right back where you
came from. No doubt your mother taught----"

"Please leave my mother out of this discussion!" Here was something he
could say with great severity and dignity--something that would imply
the contrast between what Clare Crosby stood for and the high standards
of his mother, whose fame might not be tarnished even through the
mention of her name by a culpable woman.

Clare laughed. "Early Victorian," she commented, cheerfully; "that
do-not-sully-the-fair-name-of-mother business. It's in your blood,
Felix,--along with the determination you feel never to change when once
you've made up your mind, as if your mind were something that has set
itself solid, as metal does when it's run into a mold."

"Oh, indeed! Just like that!"

She nodded. "Precisely. And when you make up your mind that someone
is wrong, or has hurt your vanity (which is worse), you are just
middle-class enough to love to swing a whip."

He got up. "Pardon me if I don't care to listen to your opinion of me
any longer," he said. "It just happens that I've caught you at your
tricks to