"How do you mean?" he asked.

"Why--it's hard to say--" she hesitated, but evidently not at all in
embarrassment, looking at him with serious eyes, limpid and unafraid.
"I've been with boys and men a lot, of course, in my classes and in
the laboratories and everywhere, and I've found out that in most cases
if the men and the girls really, really in their own hearts don't want
to hurt each other, don't want to get something out of the other, but
just want to be friends--why, they _can_ be! Psychologists and all
the big-wigs say they can't be, I know--but, believe me!--I've tried
it--and it's awfully nice, and it's a shame that everybody shouldn't
know that lots of the time you _can_ do it--in spite of the folks who
write the books! Maybe it wasn't so when the books were written, maybe
it's only going to be so, later, if we all are as square as we can be
now. But as a plain matter of fact, in one girl's experience, it's
so, _now_! Of course," she modified by a sweeping qualification the
audacity of her naïvely phrased, rashly innocent guess at a new
possibility for humanity, "of course if the man's a _decent_ man."

Arnold had not taken his gaze for an instant from her gravely
thoughtful eyes. He was quite pale. He looked astonishingly moved,
startled, arrested. When she stopped, he said, almost at once, in
a very queer voice as though it were forced out of him, "I'm not a
decent man."

And then, quite as though he could endure no longer her clear, steady
gaze, he covered his eyes with his hand. An instant later he had
sprung up and walked rapidly away out to the low marble parapet which
topped the terrace. His gesture, his action had been so eloquent of
surprised, intolerable pain, that Sylvia ran after him, all one quick