Crossword-Solution: SWINDLER 8 letters, 60 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

He insisted on clearing the table, and again devoted himself to his game of patience: piecing together the map of Paris, the bits of which he’d stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any old how. I helped him. Then he asked me, straight out, ‘What would you say was the true centre of Paris?’I was taken aback, wrong-footed. I thought this knowledge was part of a whole body of very rarefied and secret lore. Playing for time, I said, ‘The starting point of France’s r…

Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists.

Learning that he was a professional swindler should have made her shame a hundred times worse. Instead, it took the sting out of it. The whole affair was disgusting, and she was unwise to have trusted him, but she had been one of many victims. She wouldn't stand out in his mind as more foolish than other women. What a strange, vain thing the mind was.