"Particularly," she interrupted, cuttingly, "as I remember how you said a little while ago that you hate a liar." She lifted her brows. She had caught him squarely. The cage was a lie. He put it behind a chair, where it would be out of sight. "Well, you see," he went on lamely, "if you hadn't wanted to see me, why--why----" (Here he was, apologetic!) "Oh, I quite understand. It's always legitimate for a man to cheat a woman, isn't it? It's not legitimate for a woman to cheat a man." She seated herself. He winced. He had expected something so different--weeping, pleading, the wringing of hands; or, a hidden face and heaving shoulders, and, of course, more lies. Instead, here was only quiet composure, more dignity of carriage than he had ever noted in her before, and a firmly shut mouth. He had anticipated being hurt by the sobbing confessions he would force from her. But her cool indifference, her self-possession, were hurting him far more. Their positions were unpleasantly reversed. And he was standing before her, as if he, and not she, was the culprit! "Sit down, please," she bade, courteously. He sat, pulling at his mustache. Now he was getting angry. His look roved beyond her, as he sought for the right beginning. "What I'd like to ask," he commenced, "is, are you prepared to tell me all I ought to know--about yourself?" ("Tell me the truth" was what he would have liked to say, but the confounded cage made impossible any allusion to truth!) She smiled. "And I'd like to know, are you prepared to tell me all--all I ought to know--about yourself?" "Oh, now come!" he returned--and could go no further. Here was more of the unexpected: he was being put on the defensive! "You've been a soldier," she went on; "you've seen a lot of the world before you met me. But you didn't recite anything you'd done. You expected me to take you 'as is,' and I thought, naturally enough, that that was the way you meant to take me." "But I don't see why a girl should know about matters in which she is not concerned--which were a part of a man's past." "Exactly. And that's just the way I felt about matters in which you were not concerned. But--I was wrong, wasn't I? You're not an American. You're a European. And you have the Continental attitude toward women--proprietorship, and so on." He stared. He had never heard her talk like this before. "Ah, um," he murmured, still worrying the mustache. She was using no slang, and that "Continental attitude"--his glance said, "Where did you come by _that_?" "I've known all along that you had the Old World bias--the idea that it is justice for the Pot to call the Kettle black--the idea that a man can do anything, but that a woman is lost forever if she happens to make one mistake. That all belongs, of course, right back where you came from. No doubt your mother taught----"