“Oh, I don’t think you’re brutal. You’re just a little dippy, ain’t—aren’t—you? But that’s because you let yourself go. If when you feel it comin’ on you’d just—but perhaps you’d rather be dippy. Would you?”
If he could have called these wide goldstone eyes with their tiny flames maternal it is the word he would have chosen. In spite of the difficulty of the minute he was conscious of a flicker of amusement.
“I don’t know that I would, but––”
“After I’m gone shall we—shall we stay married?”
This being the real question he was glad she faced it with the directness which gave her a kind of charm. He admitted that. She had the charm of everything which is genuine of its kind. She made no pretense. Her expression, her voice, her lack of sophistication, all had the limpidity of water. He felt himself thanking God for it. “He alone knows what kind of hands I might have fallen into yesterday, crazy fool that I am.” Of this child, crude as she was, he could make his own disposition.
So in answer to her question he told her he had seen his lawyer in the afternoon—he was a lawyer himself but he didn’t practice—and the great man had explained to him that of all the processes known to American jurisprudence the retracing of such steps as they had taken on the previous day was one of the 140 simplest. What the law had joined the law could put asunder, and was well disposed toward doing so. There being several courses which they could adopt, he put them before her one by one. She listened with the sort of attention which shows the mind of the listener to be fixed on the speaker, rather than on anything he says. Not being obliged to ask questions or to make answers she could again see him as the handsome, dark-eyed prince whom she would have loved to save from drowning or any other fate.
Of all he said she could attach a meaning to but one word: “desertion.” Even in the technical marital sense she knew vaguely its significance. She thought of it with a tightening about the heart. Any desertion of him of which she would be capable would be like that of the little mermaid when she dived sorrowfully down to her father’s palace, leaving him with those to whom he belonged. It was this thought which prompted a question flung in among his observations, though the link in the train of thought was barely traceable:
“Is she takin’ you back—the girl you told me about yesterday?”
He looked puzzled. “Did I tell you about a girl yesterday?”
“Why, sure! You said she kicked you out––”