“You’re drunk,” she cried, once more consumed by a sudden fear of him.
“No, I’m not; but I’m crazy, if you want to put it that way, and you’re the cause of it! I’m tired o’ plottin’ and schemin’ and gettin’ mixed up in all kinds o’ dirty work, and I want to take it easy now, and enjoy life a little!”
She gasped at his words. Were his aspirations, then, quite as high as hers? Were all the vague ideals she mouthed to Durkin and herself only the thoughts of any mottled-souled evil-doer?
Then she watched him slowly close the great polished pig-skin wallet, replace it in his inside breast-pocket, and secure it there with its safety-button.
Frances gazed at him blankly, with detached and impersonal attention. He stood to her there the embodiment of what all her old life had been. In him she saw incarnate all its hideousness, all its degrading coarseness, all its hopeless vileness and wickedness. And this was what she had dreamed that at a moment’s notice she could thrust behind her! She had thought that it could be slipped off, at a turn of the hand, like a soiled skirt, when the insidious poison of it had crept into her very bones, when it had corroded and withered and killed that holier something which should have remained untouched and unsullied in her inmost heart of hearts. He was her counterpart, her mate, this gross man with the many-wrinkled, square-set jaw, with the stolid bull-neck, with his bloated, vulpine face and his subdolous green eyes. This was what she had fallen to, inch by inch, and day by day. And here he was talking to her, wisely, as to one of his kind, bargaining for her bruised and weary body, as though love and honor and womanly devotion were chattels to be bought and sold in the open market.
The ultimate, inexorable hopelessness, the foredoomed tragedy of her dwarfed and perverted life came crushingly home to her, as she looked at him, still confronting her there in his challenging comradeship of crime and his kinship of old-time dishonor.
“Mack,” she said quietly, but her voice was hard and dry and colorless, “I could never marry you, now. But under one condition I would be willing to go with you, wherever you say.”
“And that condition is?”
“It is that you return to Durkin every cent you owe him, and let him go his way, while we go ours.”
“You mean that, Frank?”