Instead of making others franker, people were inclined to rebuke his credulity by restraint and equivocation on their own part.

But the evasion thus offered to her, although only temporary, was a temptation she could not resist.

And it prolonged an interview that a ruthless revelation of the truth might have shortened.
"She did not tell me she was going there," she replied still evasively; "and, indeed," she added, with a burst of candor still more dangerous, "I only learned it from the hotel clerk after she was gone.

But I want to talk to you about her relations to Van Loo," she said, with a return of her former intensity of gaze, "and I thought we would be less subject to interruption here than at the hotel.

Only I suppose everybody knows this place, and any of those flirting couples are likely to come here.
Besides," she added, with a little half-hysterical laugh and a slight shiver, as she looked up at the high interlacing boughs above her head, "it's as public as the aisles of a church, and really one feels as if one were 'speaking out' in meeting.