“You—­you mean you want m-me—­to go with you, Cissie?” he stammered.

The girl suddenly began trembling, now that her last reserve of indirection had been torn away.

“Listen, Peter,” she began breathlessly.  “I’m not the sort of woman you think.  If I hadn’t accused myself, we’d be married now.  I—­I wanted you more than anything in the world, Peter, but I did tell you.  Surely, surely, Peter, that shows I am a good woman—­th-the real I. Dear, dear Peter, there is a difference between a woman and her acts.  Peter, you’re the first man in all my life, in a-all my life who ever came to me k-kindly and gently; so I had to l-love you and t-tell you, Peter.”

The girl’s wavering voice broke down completely; her face twisted with grief.  She groped for her chair, sat down, buried her face in her arms on the table, and broke into a chattering outbreak of sobs that sounded like some sort of laughter.

Her shoulders shook; the light gleamed on her soft, black Caucasian hair.  There was a little rent in one of the seams in her cheap jacket, at one of the curves where her side molded into her shoulder.  The customer made garment had found Cissie’s body of richer mold than it had been designed to shield.  And yet in Peter’s distress and tenderness and embarrassment, this little rent held his attention and somehow misprized the wearer.

It seemed symbolic in the searching white light.  He could see the very break in the thread and the widened stitches at the ends of the rip.  Her coat had given way because she was modeled more nearly like the Venus de Milo than the run of womankind.  He felt the little irony of the thing, and yet was quite unable to resist the comparison.

And then, too, she had referred again to her sin of peculation.  A woman enjoys confessions from a man.  A man’s sins are mostly vague, indefinite things to a woman, a shadowy background which brings out the man in a beautiful attitude of repentance; but when a woman confesses, the man sees all her past as a close-up with full lighting.  He has an intimate acquaintance with just what she’s talking about, and the woman herself grows shadowy and unreal.  Men have too many blots not to demand whiteness in women.  By striking some such average, nature keeps the race a going moral concern.

So Peter, as he stood looking down on the woman who was asking him to marry her, was filled with as unhappy and as impersonal a tenderness as a born brother.  He recalled the thoughts which had come to him when he saw Cissie passing his window.  She was not the sort of woman he wanted to marry; she was not his ideal.  He cast about in his head for some gentle way of putting her off, so that he would not hurt her any further, if such an easement were possible.

As he stood thinking, he found not a pretext, but a reality.  He stooped over, and put a hand lightly on each of her arms.

“Cissie,” he said in a serious, even voice, “if I should ever marry any one, it would be you.”