"You must have heard or read of places ... where men and women meet," he insisted. Then, with an immense effort, I managed to say that I didn't seem able to think. I had been imagining other people insane. But perhaps it was I.... I stared over the top of the French paper, that he was both holding up and hiding from me. I thought to myself: "My mind is going." I must have said as much, for he answered quickly: "Not a bit of it! You've had a shock--that's all." I did not realise it at the time, but, looking back, I seem to see the man's growing horror of my horror, and his fear I should betray him. "I am sorry I told you," he said. What was it he had told me? I asked him to help me to understand. "You make it hard. That isn't fair," he said. "You give me a sense of violation. You implicate me, in spite of the quixotic resolve I made when you begged me not to go. You make _me_, after all, an instrument of initiation." Yes, he complained. Yet, looking back from the bleak height of later knowledge, I think he betrayed some relish of the moment. Heaven forgive me if I do him wrong! But he was not, I think, losing all that he had come for, or he would have shortened my agony. He was conscious, I think, of the excitement of finding himself, intellectually, on virgin ground. True, he was sacrificing what few of his sort would sacrifice. And he was running the gravest personal risk; for at some point I asked about that. "If she knew what you had told me, what would she do?" "Call in her bullies to beat me to a jelly." He was more and more unwilling to seem a mere adjunct of the baseness he unveiled. I was not to judge too harshly. "This situation"--he nodded towards Bettina, the old man, and the young one--"all this, far more crudely managed, is a commonplace in the world--in every capital of every nation on the earth. And it has always been so." He saw I did not believe him. He seemed to imagine that, while I was being torn on the rack where he had stretched me, I could think of other things. I cried to him under my breath not to torture me any more--"help me quickly to get help!" He said I must trust him. Everything depended on choosing the right moment. "If you went out now, with that face, you'd pull the house about our ears."