She really understood very little of it. Miss Eppendorfer, although protesting constantly how she “loved” Kurt, seemed actually to display more hate than affection. She bore him a bitter grudge for this “love.” She was full of stories of his sneers, his taunts; how he had pulled the pins out of her hair and then laughed himself sick at the bleached and scanty locks. How he compared her to other women whom he had seen in the course of the day; how he had asked her to sing, and then mocked her. How he wasted her money and forever demanded more. She knew that he ridiculed her to his friends. He encouraged her to drink and then got her to sign cheques.... The end of her recital left her stripped of all decency, all honour, showed her a weak fool destroyed by a vice, something to shudder at: yet her honesty, her lack of self-justification, the eternal and naked humanness in it all, touched even the fastidious young girl. “This awful thing is _I_!” the woman seemed to say. “This is my soul. May God help me, and Man pity me!” Frances sat beside her till she fell asleep, wiser, kinder, better than she had ever been before. CHAPTER THIRTEEN I Mr. Naylor telephoned the next morning. “I’m waiting downstairs in the hall,” he said. “I don’t care to come up.” Frances hurried into her hat and jacket and went down. She got into the motor-car beside him, indescribably relieved to get away from the flat for a while. She looked at him with a smile. “Well!” she said. “Well!” he repeated. “Upon my word, that was a jolly little party last night! That German chap!” “You don’t know how sorry I felt, bringing that on you. But, of course, I never imagined----” “You know, though, it’s no place for you, Miss Defoe. That woman’s not----” “Please! You really can’t understand her as I do. She--really, she’s....” She stopped, at a loss, but quite determined to protect the poor wretch who had begged for pity the night before. “She has so many good points,” she went on, “Oh, I’m not quite an idiot, Mr. Naylor.... I see her as she is. Only--I’d rather dwell on her good qualities. She’s been very kind to me.” Not for worlds would she have told anyone of the two dreadful scenes. She enlarged on Miss Eppendorfer’s friendliness and good humour and the excellence of her work. “That’s all very well,” said he, “but I stick to it that it’s no place for _you_.” They didn’t talk much more on the way down; Mr. Naylor was too much occupied with his driving, which was minutely careful. He took no risks, and he muttered furiously against those who did. He seemed to Frankie unnecessarily prudent; she would have liked to go faster, as lots of other cars did. However, a look at his frowning face reproved her; she felt that this driving business must be more difficult, more perilous than her inexperience imagined.