I could not feel any scorn or contempt for her; I could as soon have looked down on a martyr burning at the stake for an act in which I did not believe.  She was like a dumb beast tied in a burning stall, only able to moan and cry out and endure.

I have often thought that to any one who had not seen and heard it, the first thing she said might seem comic.

“Jacob,” she said, with her face buried in my breast, “they’ve got it worked around so—­I’m goin’ to have a baby!”

But when you think of the circumstances; the poor, pretty, inexperienced girl; of that poor slack-twisted family; of her defenselessness in that great house; of the experienced and practised and conscienceless seducer into whose hands she had fallen—­when you think of all this, I do not see how you can fail to see how the words were wrung from her as a statement of the truth.  “They” meant all the forces which had been too strong for her, not the least, her own weakness—­for weakness is one of the most powerful forces in our affairs.  “They had got it worked around”—­as if the very stars in their courses had conspired to destroy her.  I had no impulse to laugh at her strange way of stating it, as if she had had nothing to do with it herself:  instead, I felt the tears of sympathy roll down my face upon her hair of rich brown.

“That’s why my folks have throwed me off,” she went on.  “But I ain’t bad, Jacob.  I ain’t bad.  Take me, and save me!  I’ll always be good to you, Jake; I’ll wash your feet with my hair!  I’ll kiss them!  I’ll eat the crusts from the table an’ be glad, for I love you, Jacob.  I’ve loved you ever since I saw you.  If I have been untrue to you, it was because I was overcome, and you never looked twice at me, and I thought I was to be a great lady.  Now I’ll be mud, trod on by every beast that walks, an’ rooted over by the hawgs, unless you save me.  I’ll work my fingers to the bone f’r you, Jacob, to the bone.  You’re my only hope.  For Christ’s sake let me hope a little longer!”

The thought that she was coming to me to save her from the results of her own sin never came into my mind.  I only saw her as a lost woman, cast off even by her miserable family, whose only claim to respectability was their having kept themselves from the one depth into which she had fallen.  I thought again of that wretch who had been kind to me in Buffalo, and of poor Rowena, in poverty and want, stripped of every defense against wrongs piled on wrongs, rooted over, as she said, by the very swine, until she should come to some end so dreadful that I could not imagine it; and not of her alone.  There would be another life to be thought of.  I knew that Buckner Gowdy, for she had told me of his blame in the matter, of her appeal to him, of his light-hearted cruelty to her, of how now at last, after months of losing rivalry between her and that other of his victims, the wife of Mobley the overseer, she had come to me in desperation—­I knew there was nothing in that cold heart to which Rowena could make any appeal that had not been made unsuccessfully by others in the same desperate case.