“You’re not comin’ back tomorrow! You’re not comin’ back at all, my pink-and-white beauty! I’m tellin’ you this for two reasons. One is that I don’t want you to carry off the idea that you’ve been breakin’ me all up, and the other is that I’m not so rotten bad as—well, as Bob Pinkerton would try to make me out. That’s all.”
“Good-bye!” murmured the humbled woman from the doorway.
“Good-bye, and good luck!” answered Sunset Bryan in his genial bass.
CHAPTER XXII
For all the rest of that day Frances Candler hated herself, hated Durkin for the mean and despicable paths into which he and his plottings had forced her, hated her sordid and humiliating conquest of the gambler Bryan and his secret.
But most of all she hated what she saw was happening within herself, the insidious and yet implacable hardening and narrowing of all her nature, the accumulating of demeaning and corroding memories, the ripening of a more and more morose self-contempt into a vague yet sullen malevolence of thought and wish.
She told herself, forlornly, that she still would not let her better nature die without a struggle, for all that she had done, and for all that she had been through. What crushed and disheartened her was the conviction that this struggle once more, in the end, would prove a futile one. She was not bad, though, not all bad, like women she had known! She had always aspired and turned toward what was right and good—her spirit cried out desolately. It was not that she had gained anything through all her wrong-doing. From the first, she felt, she had been the tool in some stronger hand; she had been only the leaf on the winds of some darker destiny. At first it had been to live, and nothing more. Now it was to love—only some day to love as she had always hoped to do; not at once to win the crown, but some day to hope to be able to win that crown. For this she was surrendering her womanhood, her integrity of soul, even the last shred of her tattered self-respect.
She would not die in a day, she told herself again, desperately. She would not surrender everything without a struggle. What remained of her scattered legions of honor, she passionately promised herself, would still be gathered together and fostered and guarded.
Above all things, she felt, she needed companionship. Durkin meant much to her—meant far too much to her, for time and time again he had only too easily shattered her card-house of good resolutions. She had blindly submerged herself for him and his efforts. It was not that she stopped to blame or reprove him; her feeling was more one of pity, of sorrow for the unstable and unreconciled nature in the fell clutch of circumstance. Yes, he meant more to her than she dare tell herself. But there were moods and moments when he proved inadequate, and to allow that sad truth to go unrecognized was more than blindness. If only she had, or could have, the friendship of a woman,—that was her oft-recurring thought,—the companionship of one warm nature quick to understand the gropings and aspirations of another. With such a friend, she vaguely felt, things might not yet be so ill with her.
But she knew of none. There was no one, she realized, to whom she could look for help. And she tried to console herself with the bitter unction of the claim that with her the world had always been doggedly unkind and cruel, that with an Æschylean pertinacity, morbidly interpreted as peculiar to her case, fate, or destiny, or the vague forces for which those words stood, had hounded and frustrated her at every turn.