"I believe I invited myself," he answered, with attempted cheerfulness.

Then it struck him, in his predicament, that this was precisely what others had done!

"When you asked me a little while ago whether I had left the Church, I let you think I had. I am still connected with St. John's, but I do not know how long I shall continue to be."

She was on her knees with dustpan and whiskbroom, cleaning up the fragments of gla.s.s on the stained carpet. And she glanced up at him swiftly, diviningly.

"Say--you're in trouble yourself, ain't you?"

She got up impulsively, spilling some of the contents of the pan. A subtle change had come in her, and under the gallantly drooping feathers of her hat he caught her eye--the human eye that so marvellously reflects the phases of the human soul: the eye which so short a time before hardily and brazenly had flashed forth its invitation, now actually shone with fellowship and sympathy. And for a moment this look was more startling, more appalling than the other; he shrank from it, resented it even more. Was it true that they had something in common?

And if so, was it sin or sorrow, or both?

"I might have known," she said, staring at him. In spite of his gesture of dissent, he saw that she was going over the events of the evening from her new point of view.

"I might have known, when we were sitting there in Harrods, that you were up against it, too, but I couldn't think of anything but the way I was fixed. The agent's been here twice this week for the rent, and I was kind of desperate for a square meal."

Hodder took the dustpan from her hand, and flung its contents into the fireplace.

"Then we are both fortunate," he said, "to have met each other."

"I don't see where you come in," she told him.

He turned and smiled at her.

"Do you remember when I was here that evening about two months ago I said I should like to be your friend? Well, I meant it. And I have often hoped, since then, that some circ.u.mstance might bring us together again.

You seemed to think that no friendship was possible between us, but I have tried to make myself believe that you said so because you didn't know me."

"Honest to G.o.d?" she asked. "Is that on the level?"

"I only ask for an opportunity to prove it," he replied, striving to speak naturally. He stooped and laid the dustpan on the hearth. "There!

Now let's sit down."

She sank on the sofa, her breast rising and falling, her gaze dumbly fixed on him, as one under hypnosis. He took the rocker.

"I have wanted to tell you how grateful Mrs. Garvin, the boy's mother--was for the roses you brought. She doesn't know who sent them, but I intend to tell her, and she will thank you herself. She is living out in the country. And the boy--you would scarcely recognize him."

"I couldn't play the piano for a week after--that thing happened." She glanced at the s.p.a.ce where the instrument had stood.

"You taught yourself to play?" he asked.

"I had music lessons."

"Music lessons?"

"Not here--before I left home--up the State, in a little country town,--Madison. It seems like a long time ago, but it's only seven years in September. Mother and father wanted all of us children to know a little more than they did, and I guess they pinched a good deal to give us a chance. I went a year to the high school, and then I was all for coming to the city--I couldn't stand Madison, there wasn't anything going on. Mother was against it,--said I was too good-looking to leave home. I wish I never had. You wouldn't believe I was good-looking once, would you?"

She spoke dispa.s.sionately, not seeming to expect a.s.sent, but Hodder glanced involuntarily at her wonderful crown of hair. She had taken off her hat. He was thinking of the typical crime of American parents,--and suddenly it struck him that her speech had changed, that she had dropped the suggestive slang of the surroundings in which she now lived.

"I was a fool to come, but I couldn't see it then. All I could think of was to get away to a place where something was happening. I wanted to get into Ferguson's--everybody in Madison knew about Ferguson's, what a grand store it was,--but I couldn't. And after a while I got a place at the embroidery counter at Pratt's. That's a department store, too, you know. It looked fine, but it wasn't long before I fell wise to a few things." (She relapsed into slang occasionally.) "Have you ever tried to stand on your feet for nine hours, where you couldn't sit down for a minute? Say, when Florry Kinsley and me--she was the girl I roomed with--would get home at night, often we'd just lie down and laugh and cry, we were so tired, and our feet hurt so. We were too used up sometimes to get up and cook supper on the little stove we had. And sitting around a back bedroom all evening was worse than Madison. We'd go out, tired as we were, and walk the streets."

He nodded, impressed by the fact that she did not seem to be appealing to his sympathy. Nor, indeed, did she appear--in thus picking up the threads of her past--to be consciously accounting for her present. She recognized no causation there.

"Say, did you ever get to a place where you just had to have something happen? When you couldn't stand bein' lonely night after night, when you went out on the streets and saw everybody on the way to a good time but you? We used to look in the newspapers for notices of the big b.a.l.l.s, and we'd take the cars to the West End and stand outside the awnings watching the carriages driving up and the people coming in. And the same with the weddings. We got to know a good many of the swells by sight.

There was Mrs. Larrabbee,"--a certain awe crept into her voice--"and Miss Ferguson--she's sweet--and a lot more. Some of the girls used to copy their clothes and hats, but Florry and me tried to live honest. It was funny," she added irrelevantly, "but the more worn out we were at night, the more we'd want a little excitement, and we used to go to the dance-halls and keep going until we were ready to drop."

She laughed at the recollection.

"There was a floorwalker who never let me alone the whole time I was at Pratt's--he put me in mind of a pallbearer. His name was Selkirk, and he had a family in Westerly, out on the Grade Suburban.... Some of the girls never came back at all, except to swagger in and buy expensive things, and tell us we were fools to work. And after a while I noticed Florry was getting discouraged. We never had so much as a nickel left over on Sat.u.r.days and they made us sign a paper, when they hired us, that we lived at home. It was their excuse for paying us six dollars a week. They do it at Ferguson's, too. They say they can get plenty of girls who do live at home. I made up my mind I'd go back to Madison, but I kept putting it off, and then father died, and I couldn't!

"And then, one day, Florry left. She took her things from the room when I was at the store, and I never saw her again. I got another roommate.

I couldn't afford to pay for the room alone. You wouldn't believe I kept straight, would you?" she demanded, with a touch of her former defiance.

"I had plenty of chances better than that floorwalker. But I knew I was good looking, and I thought if I could only hold out I might get married to some fellow who was well fixed. What's the matter?"

Hodder's exclamation had been involuntary, for in these last words she had unconsciously brought home to him the relentless predicament in the lives of these women. She had been saving herself--for what? A more advantageous, sale!

"It's always been my luck," she went on reflectingly, "that when what I wanted to happen did happen, I never could take advantage of it. It was just like that to-night, when you handed me out the bill of fare, and I ordered beefsteak. And it was like that when--when he came along--I didn't do what I thought I was going to do. It's terrible to fall in love, isn't it? I mean the real thing. I've read in books that it only comes once, and I guess it's so."

Fortunately she seemed to expect no answer to this query. She was staring at the wall with unseeing eyes.

"I never thought of marrying him, from the first. He could have done anything with me--he was so good and generous--and it was him I was thinking about. That's love, isn't it? Maybe you don't believe a woman like me knows what love is. You've got a notion that goin' downhill, as I've been doing, kills it, haven't you? I Wish to G.o.d it did--but it don't: the ache's there, and sometimes it comes in the daytime, and sometimes at night, and I think I'll go crazy. When a woman like me is in love there isn't anything more terrible on earth, I tell you. If a girl's respectable and good it's bad enough, G.o.d knows, if she can't have the man she wants; but when she's like me--it's h.e.l.l. That's the only way I can describe it. She feels there is nothing about her that's clean, that he wouldn't despise. There's many a night I wished I could have done what Garvin did, but I didn't have the nerve."

"Don't say that!" he commanded sharply.

"Why not? It's the best way out."

"I can see how one might believe it to be," he answered. Indeed, it seemed that his vision had been infinitely extended, that he had suddenly come into possession of the solution of all the bewildered, despairing gropings of the human soul. Only awhile ago, for instance, the mood of self-destruction had been beyond his imagination: tonight he understood it, though he still looked upon it with horror. And he saw that his understanding of her--or of any human being--could never be of the intellect. He had entered into one of those astounding yet simple relationships wherein truth, and truth alone, is possible. He knew that such women lied, deceived themselves; he could well conceive that the image of this first lover might have become idealized in her vicissitudes; that the memories of the creature-comforts, of first pa.s.sion, might have enhanced as the victim sank. It was not only because she did not attempt to palliate that he believed her.

"I remember the time I met him,--it was only four years ago last spring, but it seems like a lifetime. It was Decoration Day, and it was so beautiful I went out with another girl to the Park, and we sat on the gra.s.s and looked at the sky and wished we lived in the country. He was in an automobile; I never did know exactly how it happened,--we looked at each other, and he slowed up and came back and asked us to take a ride. I had never been in one of those things--but that wasn't why I went, I guess. Well, the rest was easy. He lost his head, and I was just as bad. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how rich he was: it scared me when I found out about him, and he was so handsome and full of fun and spirits, and generous! I never knew anybody like him. Honest, I never expected he'd want to marry me. He didn't at first,--it was only after a while. I never asked him to, and when he began to talk about it I told him it would cut him off from his swell friends, and I knew his father might turn him loose. Oh, it wasn't the money! Well, he'd get mad all through, and say he never got along with the old man, and that his friends would have to take me, and he couldn't live without me. He said he would have me educated, and bought me books, and I tried to read them. I'd have done anything for him. He'd knocked around a good deal since he'd been to Harvard College,--he wasn't what you'd call a saint, but his heart was all right. And he changed, too, I could see it. He said he was going to make something out of himself.

"I didn't think it was possible to be so happy, but I had a feeling all along, inside of me, that it couldn't come off. I had a little flat in Rutger Street, over on the south side, and everything in the world I wanted. Well, one day, sure enough, the bell rang and I opened the door, and there stood a man with side whiskers staring at me, and staring until I was frightened to death. I never saw such eyes as he had. And all of a sudden I knew it was his father.

"'Is this Miss Marcy?'" he said.

"I couldn't say anything at all, but he handed me his card and smiled, I'll never forget how he smiled--and came right in and sat down. I'd heard of that man all my life, and how much money he'd made, and all that. Why, up in Madison folks used to talk about him--" she checked herself suddenly and stared at Hodder in consternation. "Maybe you know him!" she exclaimed. "I never thought!"

"Maybe I do," he a.s.sented wearily. In the past few moments suspicion had become conviction.

"Well--what difference does it make--now? It's all over, and I'm not going to bother him. I made up my mind I wouldn't, on account of him, you understand. I never fell that low--thank G.o.d!"

Hodder nodded. He could not speak.... The woman seemed to be living over again that scene, in her imagination.

"I just couldn't realize who it was sitting there beside me, but if I hadn't known it wouldn't have made any difference. He could have done anything with me, anyway, and he knew how to get at me. He said, now that he'd seen me, that he was sure I was a good girl at the bottom and loved his son, and that I wouldn't want to ruin the boy when he had such a big future ahead of him. I wouldn't have thought, to look at the man, that he could have been so gentle. I made a fool of myself and cried, and told him I'd go away and never see his son any more--that I'd always been against marrying him. Well, he almost had tears in his eyes when he thanked me and said I'd never regret it, and he pulled an envelope out of his pocket. I said I wouldn't take any money, and gave it back to him. I've always been sorry since that I didn't make him take it back--it never did anything but harm to me. But he had his way. He laid it on the table and said he wouldn't feel right, and took my hand--and I just didn't care.

"Well, what do you think I did after he'd gone? I went and played a piece on the piano,--and I never can bear to hear that ragtime to this day. I couldn't seem to feel anything. And after a while I got up and opened the envelope--it was full of crackly new hundred dollar bills--thirty of 'em, and as I sat there staring at 'em the pain came on, like a toothache, in throbs, getting worse all the time until I just couldn't stand it. I had a notion of sending the money back even then, but I didn't. I didn't know how to do it,--and as I told you, I wasn't able to care much. Then I remembered I'd promised to go away, and I had to have some money for that, and if I didn't leave right off I wouldn't have the strength to do it. I hadn't even thought where to go: I couldn't think, so I got dressed and went down to the depot anyway. It was one of those bright, bitter cold winter days after a thaw when the icicles are hanging everywhere. I went inside and walked up and down that long platform under the gla.s.s roof. My, it was cold in there! I looked over all the signs, and made up my mind I'd go to Chicago.

"I meant to work, I never meant to spend the money, but to send it back.

I'd put it aside--and then I'd go and take a little. Say, it was easy not to work--and I didn't care what happened to me as long as I wasn't going to see him again. Well, I'm not trying to smooth it over, I suppose there was something crooked about me from the start, but I just went clean to h.e.l.l with that money, and when I heard he'd gone away, I came back here."

"Something crooked!" The words rang in Hodder's ears, in his very soul.

How was he or any man to estimate, to unravel the justice from the injustice, to pa.s.s upon the merit of this woman's punishment? Here again, in this vitiated life, was only to be seen the remorseless working of law--cause and effect. Crooked! Had not the tree been crooked from the beginning--incapable of being straightened? She had herself naively confessed it. Was not the twist ingrained? And if so, where was the salvation he had preached? There was good in her still,--but what was "good"?... He took no account of his profound compa.s.sion.