“Let’s.”
“But that was terrible. How could you have done such a thing?”
“I don’t know. I could tell you in detail but let’s skip it.”
“Please let’s skip it. But I had no idea it was something as awful as that. You wouldn’t do such a thing now, would you?”
“I promise you, my sweet.”
“But you don’t ever write to her?”
“Of course not.”
“You wouldn’t tell her about us, so she could write about it?”
“No. I told her about things once, and she wrote about them. But that was in another country and besides the wench is dead.”
“Is she really dead?”
“Deader than Phoebus the Phoenician. But she doesn’t know it yet.”
“What would you do if we were together in the Piazza and you saw her?”
“I’d look straight through her to show her how dead she was.”
“Thank you very much,” the girl said. “You know that another woman, or a woman in memory, is a terrible thing for a young girl to deal with when she is still without experience.”
“There isn’t any other woman,” the Colonel told her, and his eyes were bad and remembering. “Nor is there any woman of memory.”
