She shook her head. "No, I'm not. I'm only pretending to be. I came to Easthampton to pretend to be. All the time you've known me I've been pretending,--pretending to pretend. I ceased to be a kid before the spring was over,--when I came face to face with something I had driven Martin to do and it broke me. I've been bluffing since then,--bluffing myself that I didn't care and that it wasn't my fault. I might have kept it up a bit longer,--even to the end of the summer, but Gilbert said something this morning that took the lynch pin out of the sham and brought it all about my ears." And there was another short silence,--if it could be called silence with the whirring of the engine and the boy driving with the throttle out. "You care for him, then?" he asked finally, looking at her. She nodded and the tears came. It was a great shock to him, somehow; he couldn't quite say why. This girl had, as she had said, played the fool with Gilbert,--led the man on and teased him into desperation. He loathed the supercilious fellow and didn't give a hang how much he suffered. Anyway, he was married and ought to have known better. But what hit was the fact that all the while she had loved this Martin of hers,--she, by whom he dated things, who had given him a new point of view about girls and who was his own very best pal. That was not up to her form and somehow hurt. And she saw that it did and was deeply sorry and ashamed. Was she to have a bad effect on every man she met? "I won't make excuses, Harry," she said. "They're so hopeless. But I want you to know that I sprang into marriage before I'd given a thought to what it all meant, and I took it as a lark, a chapter in my adventure, something that I could easily stop and look at after I'd seen and done everything and was a little breathless. I thought that Martin had gone into it in the same spirit and that for the joke of the thing we were just going to play at keeping house, as we might have played at being Indians away in the woods. It was the easiest way out of a hole I was in and made it possible for me not to creep back to my grandmother and take a whipping like a dog. Do you understand?" The boy nodded. He had seen her do things and heard her say things on the spur of the moment that were almost as unbelievable. His sympathy and quick perception were like water to her. And it was indescribably good to be believed without incredulous side-looks and suspicions, half-smiles such as Hosack would have given,--and some of the others who had lost their fineness in the world.