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At last he’s asked it, Lora thought; he’s been wanting to know that for three months.

“Yes,” she replied calmly and readily, “I have.”

“Oh,” was all he said. She could see his suddenly flushed face in the bright glare of a streetlight beside which they had stopped; they were on their way home from a Sunday at one of the Long Island beaches and were now in a solid endless line of traffic near the approach to Queensboro Bridge. The smell and noise and confusion engulfed them.

After a while he spoke again:

“I mean really. You know, really.”

“I know. Yes, I have.”

“Often?”

She laughed at him, without replying.

“Of course it’s none of my business,” he said after a silence. “But I’ve told you all about myself, you know it’s not just curiosity. No one has more respect for women than I have. You might think I might respect you less, but I certainly would not. I don’t put myself up to judge anybody, especially if I don’t know all the circumstances. My mother taught me that, she’s more tolerant than I am even. I don’t respect you a bit less.”

After another long silence, a little island of silence in the midst of the bridge’s uproar, he asked suddenly:

“Was it one of the fellows at the office?”

This is beginning to get irritating, thought Lora, this is plenty for one day. “No, it wasn’t,” she said shortly. “And if you don’t mind I’d rather talk of something else.”

“All right.” After another pause he resumed, as they swung into Sixtieth Street, “I do want to be sure though that you don’t misunderstand my — my motives. With me it isn’t a matter of respect at all, it’s just ignorance. There doesn’t seem to me to be anything — well — unclean about it. I won’t talk about it any more.”

A few days later, at lunch — for he had recently acquired the habit of asking her several times a week to lunch with him — he announced that the relation of lover and mistress appeared to him the ideal solution of the problem of sex. It certainly was capable of being a perfectly honorable relation, the French had proved that, he asserted; and added with a smile that while he was in no position to set himself up as an authority still he had thought about it a lot and it seemed to him amply demonstrable. The main thing was mutual respect, the circumstances had to be such that there could be no question about that. Didn’t Lora agree with him? Of course. Probably half the girls in the office were no better than they should be — that is, he explained hastily, from the conventional viewpoint. And the men, not one of them was pure, absolutely not one. You could tell from the way they talked. As for the physical experience, that was to be expected, even a reputable doctor would admit that the physical experience was healthy and natural and in a way inevitable; but the way they talked was disgusting. Of course they didn’t all have mistresses; the married ones had wives, which was just as good for those who were built that way; and many of the others were engaged in a sort of haphazard prowling and ambushing which to him seemed inhuman and indefensible.

At the end, after he had paid the check, not looking at Lora but busy ostentatiously with counting his change and getting it put away, he asked her to dine with him the following evening. She replied that he knew very well she couldn’t; what about her school?

“Saturday then,” he said, still not looking at her.

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “I’d counted on sewing; I’ve been out so much recently I’ve nothing fit to wear. I think I’d better not.”

“I’d love to buy you a dress,” he declared.

She stared at him, and he blushed to his ears, but he said manfully:

“Please come Saturday.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

<p>X</p>

There was a little entrance hall, a kitchen and bath, a medium-sized living- and eating-room with two windows both at one end, and a small bedroom with one window in the rear and one on the side court. The place had been recently remodelled and was bright with new plaster and fittings, but the furniture was dismal, nondescript, and — not to be offensive about it — inharmonious. The curtains particularly were soiled and bedraggled, and one of the first things Lora did after she moved in was to take them down and send them to the laundry. Whereupon the colors in the borders ran so outrageously that they were worse if anything than before, and she had to get new ones after all. On a Saturday afternoon Steve went with her to a department store to help select the material; he fancied his taste in such matters.

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