Dane turned abruptly a few feet away so that they might not see him smile. As far as he was concerned this was beginning to be funny.
But it was not funny to Davenport Carr, now powerless against her.
“Do you know that the whole place knows you are living with Barrington?”
“It can’t know it. But it loves to feed its nasty minds on the idea. It loves to whisper about it and tell tales about it and lick its lips over it. Yes, of course it does. And just because it is like that I despise it, and won’t have anything to do with it. But if you want to know, I am living with Dane. There’s nothing extraordinary about that, is there?”
Her father half rose out of his chair and fell back again.
“You don’t mean to tell me you have come up here to talk to us about morals! Really, my dear father—but your advice is a few years too late. And when I think back over those yachting parties ———”
“Look here, Val, you can leave my morals out of this. I did not come to talk morals to either of you. I came to talk sense. You know as well as I do, unless you’re mad, that you can’t do what I did or what any man does, and there are things a man can do and things he cannot do {[longdash}}”
“Oh, yes, I remember. You told Dane he had seduced an inexperienced girl. I thank you for the compliment, but I was not an inexperienced girl.”
“What do you mean?” He stared up at her, grasping the arms of his chair.
She went on much more quietly.
“Just what I said. I was not an inexperienced girl, not by a long shot. How anyone could be an inexperi-
