“The reason for that you probably know better than I do,” Broderick said. “But if I loved a woman I’d take nothing for granted. Not even if she swore to her feelings on a stack of Bibles. She’d have to prove her words by her deeds before I gave up hope. If she’d been mine once, I’d almost have to know she was finding comfort in another man’s arms before I’d be convinced that her feeling for me was dead. There’d be pain in that, but it would take about that to convince me. And by your own admission you don’t know. You haven’t given her or yourself a fair fighting chance. It’s one thing to act in a whirl of feeling. Things often look altogether different when you’ve dropped back to everyday living. You took your hurt and ran away and nursed it. You didn’t wait to see what happened after you’d done your part. You don’t know but she’s somewhere nursing a grief that overtook her the minute you took yourself beyond sight and hearing of her.”
“No chance,” Joe muttered.
“No chance?” Broderick echoed, with a tinge of scorn in his voice. “The law of probabilities is all on your side. I wish I felt my chances as good. I wish that my chance of happiness had been half as good as yours. Would I throw up my hands and go wandering up and down the earth with pain and uncertainty and self-pity like thorns in my flesh? I should say not!”
“You don’t understand,” Joe answered somberly. “There’s some things a man can’t put into words. He can only feel them.”
“But I do understand,” Broderick insisted. “I’ve been through the mill. A man gets on the grid, and he can only squirm. I know what it is to ache with a pain that isn’t physical. But with me it came of actual unescapable knowledge—the pain of sheer unchangeable hopelessness. You took a lot of things for granted. Seems to me you ran away under fire.”
Joe threw out his hands impotently. “What the devil else could I do?” he demanded harshly. “She had to be free—free to marry the man she wanted. I could have stood on my rights as a husband. What was the use? She’d only have hated me. It wasn’t any light love affair with her. She wasn’t that kind. She wanted happiness—she could only see it in a certain direction—but she wanted it to come decently and honorably. There was no ground for divorce. I had to devise a ground. So I deserted her. As I saw it, there wasn’t anything else for me to do.”
Broderick’s eyes gleamed.
“You’re a man,” he said quietly, “a real man. But a fool for all that, I think. Didn’t it ever occur to you that she might really miss you after those years of intimate living? That your clean sweep of everything might have made a gap in her life that nothing but you yourself could fill in again? A woman’s human—gifted or cursed, as you like to put it—with all the human vagaries of impulse. Sometimes it takes a grand upheaval to make us see things as they really are—to know ourselves.”
Joe got to his feet and threw his arms wide to the sunset, and let them fall by his side.
“Why should I try to fool myself?” he said. “All I want is to forget. That’s all.”