"Friendship and I have very little to say to each other." He spoke with a
quiet bitterness that was the growth of years. "Friendship implies trust."
A bell clanged somewhere, but the signal arm fell unheeded by the man and
woman whose conversation had so suddenly become charged with a strange new
kind of intimacy.
"Then you don't trust me?" There was a hurt note in Ann's voice. She was
not used to being distrusted.
Coventry smiled ironically, as though at some secret jest of which the edge
was turned against himself.
"Sometimes I almost do," he said. "But on the whole--forgive me!--I haven't
a blind faith in your sex." He paused, then added rather grimly: "A burnt
child fears the fire, and I had my lesson many years ago."
"So you really deserve your reputation?"
"My reputation?"
"Current gossip sets you down as a confirmed misogynist, you know."
"For once, then, current gossip is correct."
The whistle of the approaching train shrilled piercingly through the air
and, startled back to a realisation of the present, Ann glanced hastily up
the line.
"You're meeting some one?" asked Eliot, his eyes following the same
direction. She assented, and he turned as though to leave her.
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