He waited a moment, then prompted: 

“Only what?”

“Only perhaps a stronger man would have told me before he—­kissed me.”

“Did that—­make so much difference?”

The green-gray eyes grew soft and the lips smiled wanly.  “Yes—­all the difference,” she said.  “It made me think for a moment that—­that everything was different....  Ordinarily people don’t—­I mean men don’t—­” She broke off and then explained a little laboriously.  “To me that sort of kiss must mean a very great deal to excuse itself.”

“But I did mean it,” he fervently assured her.  “Marcia, I have been horribly unhappy and you have been lonely.  We have seen so much of each other because we wanted each other—­needed each other.”

The girl rose and went quietly over to the window.  Outside the murk of the fog was raw and choking.  The stertorous snore of the ferry whistles was uneasy, ominous:  the spirit of the town’s myriad anxieties.  She began to speak with measured syllables and an averted face.

“No, you don’t need me, Paul.  I hadn’t understood before, but I do now.  I am this moment’s whim, that’s all.  I don’t need you either, I don’t need anyone.”  A trace of resolution and hurt pride tinged the voice, but the resolution was predominant.  “I’ve depended on myself for years and I can go on.  When you came today I wasn’t myself.  I was disappointed and miserable and my misery made its appeal to your sympathy.  You were carried away because you’re emotional, and it was all my fault.  I’m supposed to be practical and I let you do it.  We must forget about it now, that’s all.”

“Some things—­” his voice mounted to a thrill of feeling—­“can’t be forgotten.”

“They must be.”

“I have made you angry,” he said with deep contrition, “and it’s the last thing in the world I wanted to do.”

Marcia smiled again, as she might have smiled on a child who promises to be good all its life, and who will in a forgetful half-hour be again breaking all the laws and ordinances of the nursery.

“No, I’m not angry,” she said thoughtfully.  “One should not be angry with a person of your exact sort, Paul.  In another man the same thing would have made me angry, but not in you.  I am only sorry it happened.  Let’s pretend it didn’t.”

“Why,” he inquired, puzzled, as he gazed at the face still moist with its recent tears and now rather cryptic in its expression, “are your laws of judgment different for me than for other men?”

Marcia shook her head.

“Perhaps just because you are yourself different from other men.  Maybe in the artist there is something of the woman and something of the child, as well as something of the man.  One doesn’t grow angry with a child.”

“Oh!” The monosyllable came with an undernote of chagrin.  “I’m not exactly responsible.  That’s what you mean?”

She did not answer in words, but her eyes as she looked off through the drizzle with her fingers hanging limply motionless at her sides gave him the affirmative reply, and he went on in a low voice.