Fortunately she seemed to expect no answer to this query.  She was staring at the wall with unseeing eyes.

“I never thought of marrying him, from the first.  He could have done anything with me—­he was so good and generous—­and it was him I was thinking about.  That’s love, isn’t it?  Maybe you don’t believe a woman like me knows what love is.  You’ve got a notion that goin’ downhill, as I’ve been doing, kills it, haven’t you?  I Wish to God it did—­but it don’t:  the ache’s there, and sometimes it comes in the daytime, and sometimes at night, and I think I’ll go crazy.  When a woman like me is in love there isn’t anything more terrible on earth, I tell you.  If a girl’s respectable and good it’s bad enough, God knows, if she can’t have the man she wants; but when she’s like me—­it’s hell.  That’s the only way I can describe it.  She feels there is nothing about her that’s clean, that he wouldn’t despise.  There’s many a night I wished I could have done what Garvin did, but I didn’t have the nerve.”

“Don’t say that!” he commanded sharply.

“Why not?  It’s the best way out.”

“I can see how one might believe it to be,” he answered.  Indeed, it seemed that his vision had been infinitely extended, that he had suddenly come into possession of the solution of all the bewildered, despairing gropings of the human soul.  Only awhile ago, for instance, the mood of self-destruction had been beyond his imagination:  tonight he understood it, though he still looked upon it with horror.  And he saw that his understanding of her—­or of any human being—­could never be of the intellect.  He had entered into one of those astounding yet simple relationships wherein truth, and truth alone, is possible.  He knew that such women lied, deceived themselves; he could well conceive that the image of this first lover might have become idealized in her vicissitudes; that the memories of the creature-comforts, of first passion, might have enhanced as the victim sank.  It was not only because she did not attempt to palliate that he believed her.

“I remember the time I met him,—­it was only four years ago last spring, but it seems like a lifetime.  It was Decoration Day, and it was so beautiful I went out with another girl to the Park, and we sat on the grass and looked at the sky and wished we lived in the country.  He was in an automobile; I never did know exactly how it happened,—­we looked at each other, and he slowed up and came back and asked us to take a ride.  I had never been in one of those things—­but that wasn’t why I went, I guess.  Well, the rest was easy.  He lost his head, and I was just as bad.  You wouldn’t believe me if I told you how rich he was:  it scared me when I found out about him, and he was so handsome and full of fun and spirits, and generous!  I never knew anybody like him.  Honest, I never expected he’d want to marry me.  He didn’t at first,—­it was only after a while.  I never asked him to, and