'When you say "keeps back," do you mean that you've questioned her?'
'Oh, not about that!' said Braddle with beautiful simplicity.
'Then do you expect her to volunteer information———'
'That may damage her so awfully with me?' Braddle had taken it up intelligently, but appeared sufficiently at a loss as to what he expected. 'I'm sure she knows well enough I want to know.'
'I don't think I understand what you're talking about,' Chilver replied after a longish stare at the fire.
'Well, about something or other in her life; some awkward passage, some beastly episode or accident; the things that do happen, that often have happened, to women you might think perfectly straight—come now! and that they very often quite successfully hide. You know what I'm driving at: some chapter in the book difficult to read aloud—some unlucky page she'd like to tear out. God forgive me, some slip.'
Chilver, quitting the fire, had taken a turn round the room.
'Is it your idea,' he presently inquired, 'that there may have been only one? I mean one "slip."' He pulled up long enough in front of them to give his visitor's eyes time to show a guess at possible derision, then he went on in another manner. 'No, no; I really don't understand. You seem to me to see her as a column of figures each in itself highly satisfactory, but which, when you add them up, make only a total of doubt.'
'That's exactly it!' Braddle spoke almost with admiration of this neat formula. 'She hasn't really any references.'
'But, my dear man, it's not as if you were engaging a housemaid.'
Braddle was arrested but a moment. 'It's much worse. For any one else I shouldn't mind———!'
'What I don't grasp,' his companion broke in, 'is your liking her so much as to "mind" so much, without by the same stroke liking her enough not to mind at all.'
