“Oh, Steve!”
“Here!” I answered.
He came and sat down on the ground beside me. The match he laid to his pipe bowl showed his face hard-drawn. His eyes smoldered.
“Did you hear?” he asked.
“I heard you declare yourself,” said I frankly. “Then I moved out of earshot.”
He sat silent for a time.
“Joe doesn’t actively blame me,” he said at last. “But he resents everything. He’s lived within himself so long, bottling up his grief, that he’s morbid. I can’t do anything with him, can’t make him see sense. The thing he ought to do for their own two sakes—write to Norma or go to her and make up—he won’t do. You knew her, it seems. You heard his side of it—absolutely true, so far as it goes. But there’s two sides to everything.”
“Fire away,” said I—for I knew by his tone that he was smoldering inside, that he wanted the relief of talk that would neither be misunderstood nor resented.
“Joe made the same mistake that other men have made and regretted,” Broderick went on, “as near as I can gather. He let his ambition and his business overshadow his wife and his home. I suppose he felt that everything was fixed and secure and final. And that’s a bad thing with any woman young and proud and passionate as Norma Galloway. It was very simple. Joe was getting wholly immersed in his business. He was traveling a lot for his firm. And I happened to wander into her life at a time when she was in a peculiarly receptive state of mind. That sounds commonplace—but I’m not good at analysis. I loved her in my own headlong way. Nothing else mattered to me but her. I knew where I stood. She thought she did. There wasn’t anything sordid or underhand about it. We talked it over from every angle, God knows. She wasn’t happy with him. All her feeling for him seemed dead. She knew I loved her, and she believed she loved me, and that for us two life together meant happiness if we could take it up honorably together. So she told him, and you know how he played his part.”
“I’ve known Joe since we were kids,” I said. “He’s a white man.”