Blecker was silent.  What did he care for questions like this now?  He sat by her on the broken trunk, his elbows on his knees, his sultry eyes devouring her face and body.  What did it matter, if once she had been sold to another man?  She was free now:  he was dead.  He only knew that here was the only creature in earth or heaven that he loved:  there was not a breath in her lungs, a tint of her flesh, that was not dear to him, allied by some fierce passion to his own sense:  there was that in her soul which he needed, starved for:  his life balked blank here, demanding it,—­her,—­he knew not what:  but that gained, a broader freedom opened behind, unknown possibilities of honor and truth and deed.  He would take no other step, live no farther, until he gained her.  Holding, too, the sense of her youth, her rare beauty, as it seemed to him; loving it with keener passion because he alone developed it, drawing her soul to the light! how like a baby she was:  how dainty the dimpling white flesh of her arms, the soft limbs crouching there!  So pure, the man never came near her without a dull loathing of himself, a sudden remembrance of places where he had been tainted, made unfit to touch her,—­rows in Bowery dance-houses, waltzes with musk-scented fine ladies:  when this girl put her cool little hand in his sometimes, he felt tears coming to his eyes, as if the far-off God or the dead mother had blessed him.  She sat there, now, going back to that blot in her life, her eyes turned every moment up to the Power beyond in whom she trusted, to know why it had been.  He had seen little children, struck by their mother’s hand, turn on them a look just so grieved and so appealing.

“It was no one’s fault altogether, Paul,” she said.  “My mother was not selfish, more than other women.  There were very many mouths to feed:  it is so in most families like ours.”

“I know.”

“I am very dull about books,—­stupid, they say.  I could not teach; and they would not let me sew for money, because of the disgrace.  These are the only ways a woman has.  If I had been a boy”—­

“I understand.”

“No man can understand,”—­her voice growing shrill with pain.  “It’s not easy to eat the bread needed for other mouths day after day, with your hands tied, idle and helpless.  A boy can go out and work, in a hundred ways:  a girl must marry; it’s her only chance for a livelihood, or a home, or anything to fill her heart with.  Don’t blame my mother, Paul.  She had ten of us to work for.  From the time I could comprehend, I knew her only hope was, to live long enough to see her boys educated, and her daughters in homes of their own.  It was the old story, Doctor Blecker,”—­with a shivering laugh more pitiful than a cry.  “I’ve noticed it since in a thousand other houses.  Young girls like me in these poor-genteel families,—­there are none of God’s creatures more helpless or goaded, starving at their souls.  I couldn’t teach.  I had no talent; but if I had, a woman’s a woman:  she wants something else in her life than dog-eared school-books and her wages year after year.”