She’d felt nothing in the least like shame.  Certainly not at first.  On the contrary, she’d taken a deep soul-satisfying pride in it, a kind of warm sense of readiness for anything.

She told him with a little clutch of embarrassment and resolution, about another incident that happened somewhat later, attributing an importance to it which he conceded while he reflected with a smile that most people, men and women virtuous or otherwise, would have regarded as ridiculously disproportionate.  The incident concerned a man whom she didn’t much like, she said, but found somehow, fascinating.  He had been paying her attentions of a rather experimental sort for weeks, maneuvering, arranging.  He knew she lived by herself and had been angling for an invitation to come to see her, alone.  Finally, he telephoned her office one day and asked point-blank if he mightn’t come to tea that afternoon.  She said he might without telling him that she was expecting Christabel Baldwin at the same time.  An hour later, a restless hour it had been, she had telephoned Christabel and put her off so that when her other guest came he found just what he had expected.  In the manner of one sure of his welcome and intent on wasting no time, he had begun making love to her (she apologized for the employment of that phrase but said she knew no other that was usable).  She admitted that she had never had any real doubt that this was what he had meant to do and conceded him the right to think that she had invited it.  But she found it, nevertheless, unendurable.  She felt unspeakably degraded by it and presently flew into a rage and turned the man out of the house, feeling, she added, as much ashamed of that part of the performance as of anything else.

This encounter, she told March, made a profound change in her feeling about the other episode—­closed a door upon it.  Nothing like that could happen to her again.  She simply stopped thinking about it after that, buried it and it had stayed buried comfortably for the better part of a year, until Rush came home from France.  At least she wasn’t aware that it had troubled her.  The twinges of discomfort she’d felt whenever she’d faced the prospect of coming home, she had attributed to another cause altogether.

“Paula,” he observed.  “That’s easy enough to see.”

“Oh, you are a comfort,” she said; “only not Paula by herself.  Paula and father and I, in a sort of awkward triangle, all doing our best and all nagging one another.  That has got terribly worse in the last few days.”

She seemed to find no difficulty at all in informing him fully about this home situation; needed only a question or surmise dropped here and there to develop the whole story.

It wasn’t a chronological narrative.  Her mind drifted like a soaring kingfisher over the whole area between her childhood and the events of this very morning, swooping down here or there to pick up some incident wherever a gleam of memory attracted her.