Yetta had taken Walter's arm, and for a while they walked in silence. But somehow the constraint suddenly fell away, and she felt in him the old friend to whom it had always been so easy to talk.
"It's strange," she said, "how very often I have taken your advice and found it good. More and more I realize what a big factor you've been in my life. A dozen times I've been on the point of writing to you. But it's so hard to put on paper the deeper sort of thanks."
Walter tried to protest.
"Oh, yes," she insisted. "I've lots of things to thank you for. It's hard to put it into words. But now that it's ancient history, now that the wounds have healed, I want to talk about it. When you told me to marry Isadore, it seemed like the cruelest words that could be spoken. You were right in smashing up my romance. But of all the lessons you ever set me, that was the hardest to learn, the bitterest. I could not take your word for it. I had to learn it for myself. But if you had not driven me to it, I would have been a romanticist still—always weaving dreams. I would never have found the wonder and beauty of life as it is.
"I guess any suffering is worth while that teaches a real lesson. I can be philosophic about those tear-stained months now. But they were dreary enough—and sometimes worse. I don't believe there was anything that Job said about the day he was born that I did not echo.
"Isadore was wonderful those days. He didn't give me any advice nor try to comfort me. He just called me up in the morning and gave me enough work for six people. I did have a little sense left. I could see that work was my only hope of pulling through. The Clarion office was the busiest place I could find—so I cut loose from the League and went down there.
"But Mabel has never forgiven me for leaving her. I've hardly seen her since."
They walked on for a moment in silence, and then she took up her story again.
"My real ignorance used to be that I thought there could be no love without romance. I thought they were the same thing. And that's the wonder of reality, it calls out something so immensely deeper than dream-love. I see Isadore's crooked shoulder as clearly as any one. I know the words he insists on mispronouncing. I know the little, uncontrolled hooks of his temper that things are always catching on. I don't for a moment think he's a god. Perhaps it is just the fact that I know him so very much better than other people do that would make me laugh at any one who said I didn't truly love him! And then the babies! Think of it, Walter. I've got two of them. My very own! You said something like this once—that flesh and blood were more wonderful than any dream. It was a hard, painful lesson to learn, but I guess it's the one I want to thank you for most."