Judith had been a broad-minded woman, sensible, big-hearted.  But she never would have stood for this.  Once, he recollected, she had helped a girl friend to divorce her husband, a drunkard who ran after chorus girls.  But that had been quite different.  There the wife had been innocent and had done it for her children.  Laura was guilty, she hadn’t a child, she was already planning to marry again.  And then what, he asked himself.  “From bad to worse, very likely.  A woman can’t stop when she’s started downhill.”  His eye was caught by the picture directly before him on the wall—­the one his wife had given him—­two herdsmen with their cattle high up on a shoulder of a sweeping mountain side, tiny blue figures against the dawn.  It had been like a symbol of their lives, always beginning clean glorious days.  What was Laura beginning?

“Well,” he demanded angrily, as he began to jerk off his clothes, “what can I do about it?  Try to keep her from re-marrying, eh?  And suppose I succeeded, how long would it last?  She wouldn’t stay here and I couldn’t keep her.  She’ll be independent now—­her looks will be her bank account.  There’d be some other chap in no time, and he might not even marry her!” He tugged ferociously at his boots.  “No, let well enough alone!”

He finished undressing, opened the window, turned out the gas and got into bed.  Wearily he closed his eyes.  But after a time he opened them and stared long through the window up at the beetling cliff of a building close by, with its tier upon tier of lighted apartments, a huge garish hive of homes.  Yes, the town was crowding down on him to-night, on his house and on his family.  He realized it had never stopped, and that his three grown children, each one of them a part of himself, had been struggling with it all the time.  Laura—­wasn’t she part of himself?  Hadn’t he, too, had his little fling, back in his early twenties?  “You will live on in our children’s lives.”  She was a part of him gone wild.  She gave it free rein, took chances.  God, what a chance she had taken this time!  The picture of that court he had seen, with the girl in the witness chair and those many rows of eyes avidly fixed upon her, came back to his mind so vividly they seemed for a moment right here in the room, these eyes of the town boring into his house.  Angrily he shut out the scene.  And alone in the darkness, Roger said to his daughter all the ugly furious things he had not said to her upstairs—­until at last he was weary of it.

“Why am I working myself all up?  I’ve got to take this.  It’s my medicine.”

CHAPTER XXXIII