“Listen,” she said.  “Listen till I get through—­I want you to understand.  We were poor, and we weren’t fitted to be.  We never had been, and we didn’t know what to do.  We’d been almost rich; there was plenty, but my father wanted to take advantage of the growth of the town; he wanted to be richer, but instead—­well, just about the time your father finished building next door we found we hadn’t anything.  People say that, sometimes, meaning that they haven’t anything in comparison with other people of their own kind, but we really hadn’t anything—­we hadn’t anything at all, Bibbs!  And we couldn’t do anything.  You might wonder why I didn’t ’try to be a stenographer’—­and I wonder myself why, when a family loses its money, people always say the daughters ’ought to go and be stenographers.’  It’s curious!—­as if a wave of the hand made you into a stenographer.  No, I’d been raised to be either married comfortably or a well-to-do old maid, if I chose not to marry.  The poverty came on slowly, Bibbs, but at last it was all there—­ and I didn’t know how to be a stenographer.  I didn’t know how to be anything except a well-to-do old maid or somebody’s wife—­and I couldn’t be a well-to-do old maid.  Then, Bibbs, I did what I’d been raised to know how to do.  I went out to be fascinating and be married.  I did it openly, at least, and with a kind of decent honesty.  I told your brother I had meant to fascinate him and that I was not in love with him, but I let him think that perhaps I meant to marry him.  I think I did mean to marry him.  I had never cared for anybody, and I thought it might be there really wasn’t anything more than a kind of excited fondness.  I can’t be sure, but I think that though I did mean to marry him I never should have done it, because that sort of a marriage is—­it’s sacrilege—­something would have stopped me.  Something did stop me; it was your sister-in-law, Sibyl.  She meant no harm—­but she was horrible, and she put what I was doing into such horrible words—­and they were the truth—­oh!  I saw myself!  She was proposing a miserable compact with me—­and I couldn’t breathe the air of the same room with her, though I’d so cheapened myself she had a right to assume that I would.  But I couldn’t!  I left her, and I wrote to your brother—­just a quick scrawl.  I told him just what I’d done; I asked his pardon, and I said I would not marry him.  I posted the letter, but he never got it.  That was the afternoon he was killed.  That’s all, Bibbs.  Now you know what I did—­and you know—­me!” She pressed her clenched hands tightly against her eyes, leaning far forward, her head bowed before him.

Bibbs had forgotten himself long ago; his heart broke for her.  “Couldn’t you—­Isn’t there—­Won’t you—­” he stammered.  “Mary, I’m going with father.  Isn’t there some way you could use the money without—­without—­”

She gave a choked little laugh.