impulse to console. "Yes, you are, Arnold; yes, you are!" she said in
a low, energetic tone, "you _are_!"

He made a quavering attempt to be whimsical. "I'd like to know what
_you_ know about it!" he said.

"I know! I _know_!" she simply repeated.

He faced her in an exasperated shame. "Why, a girl like you can no
more know what's done by a man like me ..." his lips twitched in a
moral nausea.

"Oh ... what you've _done_ ..." said Sylvia ... "it's what you are!"

"What I _am_," repeated Arnold bitterly. "If I were worth my salt I'd
hang myself before morning!" The heartsick excitement of a man on the
crest of some moral crisis looked out luridly from his eyes.

Sylvia rose desperately to meet that crisis. "Look here, Arnold. I'm
going to tell you something I've never spoken of to anybody ... not
even Mother ... and I'm going to do it, so you'll _believe_ me when I
say you're worth living. When I was eighteen years old I was a horrid,
selfish, self-willed child. I suppose everybody's so at eighteen. I
was just crazy for money and fine dresses and things like that, that
we'd never had at home; and a man with a lot of money fell in love
with me. It was my fault. I made him, though I didn't know then what I
was doing, or at least I wouldn't let myself think what I was doing.
And I got engaged to him. I got engaged at half-past four in the
afternoon, and at seven o'clock that evening I was running away from
him, and I've never seen him since." Her voice went on steadily, but