He looked at her askance, with his bloodshot eyes.  “Can you give me any single reason why I shouldn’t?” he challenged her.

Sylvia, the modern, had no answer.  She murmured weakly, “Why must any of us try to be decent?”

“That’s for the rest of you,” he said.  “I’m counted out.  The sooner I get myself out of the way, the better for everybody.  That’s what Judith thinks.”

The bitterness of his last phrase was savage.  Sylvia cried out against it.  “Arnold!  That’s cruel of you!  It’s killing Judith!”

“She can’t care for me,” he said, with a deep, burning resentment.  “She can’t ever have cared a rap, or she wouldn’t be able to—­”

Sylvia would not allow him to go on.  “You must not say such a thing, Arnold.  You know Judith’s only reason is—­she feels if she—­if she had children and they were—­”

He interrupted her with an ugly hardness.  “Oh, I know what her reason is, all right.  It’s the latest fad.  Any magazine article can tell you all about it.  And I don’t take any stock in it, I tell you.  It’s just insanity to try to guess at every last obligation you may possibly have!  You’ve got to live your life, and have some nerve about it!  If Judith and I love each other, what is it to anybody else if we get married?  Maybe we wouldn’t have any children.  Maybe they’d be all right—­how could they be anything else with Judith for their mother?  And anyhow, leave that to them!  Let them take care of themselves!  We’ve had to do it for ourselves!  What the devil did my father do for me, I’d like to know, that I should die to keep my children unborn?  My mother was a country girl from up here in the mountains.  Since I’ve been staying here winters, I’ve met some of her people.  Her aunt told me that my father was as drunk as a lord on his wedding night—­What did he think of his son?  Why should I think of mine?”

He was so evidently talking wildly, desperately, that Sylvia made no attempt to stop him, divining with an aching pity what lay under his dreadful words.  But when he said again, “It’s simply that Judith doesn’t care enough about me to stick by me, now I’m down and out.  She can’t bear me in her narrow little good world!” Judith’s sister could keep her silence no more.

“Look here, Arnold, I haven’t meant to tell you, but I can’t have you thinking that.  Listen!  You know Judith, how splendid and self-controlled she is.  She went all through the sorrow of Mother’s death without once breaking down, not once.  But the night before I started to come here, in the middle of the night, I heard such a sound from Judith’s room!  It frightened me, so I could hardly get my breath!  It was Judith crying, crying terribly, so that she couldn’t keep it back any more.  I never knew her to cry before.  I didn’t dare go into her room—­Mother would—­but I didn’t dare.  And yet I couldn’t leave her there alone in such awful trouble.  I stood by the door in the dark—­oh, Arnold, I don’t know how long—­and heard her—­When it began to be light she was quiet, and I went back to bed; and after a while I tiptoed in.  She had gone to sleep at last.  Arnold, there under her cheek was that old baseball cap of yours ... all wet, all wet with her tears, Judith’s tears.”