"I was only wondering." "Like a woman, you resent a half-confidence." She drew in a sharp little breath. The words, the tone, stabbed her. She might have been talking to him in one of their pleasanter hours in the Chelsea flat. In spite of her burning curiosity, she said, "I'm not a woman; I'm a nurse." "Since when?" "As far as you people are concerned, since September, '14, when I went out to France. I've been through everything--from the firing-line field-ambulances, casualty clearing-stations, base hospitals--and now I'm here having a rest-cure. Hundreds and hundreds of men have told me their troubles--so I've got to regard myself as a sort of mother confessor." He smiled. "Then, like a mother confessor, you resent a half-confidence?" She put a cigarette between his lips and lit it for him. "It all depends," she said lightly, "whether you want absolution or not. I suppose it's the same old story." She held her voice in command. "Every man thinks it's original. What kind of a woman was she?" He parried the thrust. "Isn't that rather too direct a question, even for a mother confessor?" "You'll be spilling ash all over the bed. Here's an ash-tray." She guided his hand. "Then you don't want absolution?" "Oh, yes, I do! But, you see, I'm not yet _in articulo mortis_, so I'll put off my confession." "Anyhow, you loved the woman you treated badly?" The question was as casual as she could make it, while she settled the tea-things on the tray. "It was a girl, not a woman." "What has become of her?" "That's what I should like to know." "But you loved her?" "Of course I did! I'm not a blackguard. Of course I loved her." Her pulses quickened. "But much water has run under London Bridge since then." "And much blood has flowed in France." "Everything--lives, habits, modes of thought have been revolutionized. Yes"--he reflected for a moment--"it's odd how you have brought back old days. I fell in with a pestilential, so-called artistic crowd--I am an architect by profession--you know, men with long greasy hair and dirty finger nails and anarchical views. There was one chap especially, who I thought was decadent to the bone. Aloysius Eglington, he called himself." The man sprang vivid to her memory; he had once tried to make love to her. "Well, I came across him the other day with a couple of wound-stripes and the military-cross ribbon. For a man like that, what an upheaval!" He laughed again. "I suppose I've been a bit upheaved myself." "I'm beginning to piece together your story of the temperature," she said pleasantly. "I suppose the girl was one of the young females of this anarchical crowd?" Obviously the phrase jarred. "I could never regard her in that light," he said coldly. "The war has got hold of her, too, I suppose." "No doubt. She was a medical student. May I have another cigarette?" His tone signified the end of the topic. She smiled, for her putting-down was a triumph.