Dear, _almost_ every woman is 'that kind'! It's deception, not
confession, that makes them--the other kind. If Maurice will confess--"

"I haven't said there was anything to confess," he protested, in alarm.

"Oh no; certainly not. You haven't said a word! (Well; you may have just
one of those _little_ cigars--you poor dear!) Henry, listen: If Maurice
hangs a secret round his neck it will drown him."

"If Eleanor would make cocoa for him at one o'clock in the morning there
would be no chance for secrets. Kit, I have long known that you are the
wisest, as well as the most virtuous and most lovable of your sex, and
that I shall only get to heaven by hanging on to your petticoats; but in
this one particular I am much more intelligent than you."

"Heaven send you a good opinion of yourself!" his wife murmured.

But he insisted. "On certain subjects women prefer to be lied to."

"Did any woman ever tell you so?" she inquired, dryly.

He shrugged his shoulders, put his cup down, and came over to give her a
kiss.

"Which is to say, 'Hold your tongue'?" his Mary inquired.

"Oh, never!" he said, and in spite of his distress he laughed; but he
looked at her tenderly. "The Lord was good to me, Mary, when He made you
take me."

That talk in the studio marked the moment when Maurice Curtis turned his
back on youth. It was the beginning of the retreat of an ardent and
gayly candid boy into the adult sophistications of Secrecy. The next day
when he and Eleanor returned to Mercer, he sat in the car watching with
unseeing eyes the back of her head,--her swaying hat, the softly curling
tendrils of dark hair in the nape of her neck--and he saw before him a
narrow path, leading--across quaking bogs of evasions!--toward a goal of
always menaced safety. Mr. Houghton had indicated the path in that
midnight talk, and Maurice's first step upon it would be his promise to
relieve Lily of the support of her child--"_on condition that she would
never communicate with him again_." After that, Henry Houghton said,
"the lawyer will clinch things; and nobody will ever be the wiser!"
Because Eleanor was the woman she was, he saw no way of escape for
Maurice, except through this bog of secrecy, where any careless step
might plunge him into a lie. He had not dared to point out that other
path, which his Mary thought so much safer than the sucking shakiness of
the swamp--the rough and terrible path of confession, which lies across
the firm aridit