So her room
was abandoned to insensitive guests, and they dressed and slept in her
husband's chamber, which Gloria considered somehow "good," as though
Anthony's presence there had acted as exterminator of any uneasy shadows
of the past that might have hovered about its walls.
The distinction between "good" and "bad," ordered early and summarily
out of both their lives, had been reinstated in another form. Gloria
insisted that any one invited to the gray house must be "good," which,
in the case of a girl, meant that she must be either simple and
reproachless or, if otherwise, must possess a certain solidity and
strength. Always intensely sceptical of her sex, her judgments were now
concerned with the question of whether women were or were not clean. By
uncleanliness she meant a variety of things, a lack of pride, a
slackness in fibre and, most of all, the unmistakable aura of
promiscuity.
"Women soil easily," she said, "far more easily than men. Unless a
girl's very young and brave it's almost impossible for her to go
down-hill without a certain hysterical animality, the cunning, dirty
sort of animality. A man's different--and I suppose that's why one of
the commonest characters of romance is a man going gallantly to
the devil.
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