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 FLAMING

remorse,

YOUTH

249

And she did not feel remorse.

could not in any serious sense be sin.

Therefore it

Irrefutable logic!

What did she feel? She asked herself. A sense of the fullness of life, of adventure boldly dared. She had met one of the great crises of a woman’s life, the crisis, indeed.

It must be so, since all the stories and movies and plays agreed on the point. The singular aspect of it was that she was conscious of no inner change. She was the same Pat Fentriss, only a day older than yesterday. Being a “woman,” if this was it, was not so different from being eo girl.” And Mr. Scott. According to the conventions, as she had absorbed them through the sensationalised and distorted lens to which her intellectual vision had become habituated, the lover should lose all “respect” for the unfortunate girl, this being the first symptom of the waning of his love. Well, it wasn’t working that way with her lover.

The few, broken words of parting last night, the still passion of his letter, told a different story. Possibly, reflected Pat, the people who set forth what purported te be life, on screen, stage, and the printed page, didn’t know

so much about it after all. Or possibly she and Cary Scott were different from other people. She felt convinced that she was. From this she fell to speculating upon Scott’s probable attitude toward the ingenious and comforting theory of conduct and responsibility which she just had formulated specially to fit the present crisis. Somehow it did not seem quite satisfactory in the illumination of his imagined view. She had thought of him always and rather mournfully as a non-religious if not actually irreligious man; but it was disturbingly cast up from the depths of her mind that if Cary Scott had a God, he would never try either to make cheap excuses to nor shift responsibility