"Different from mine, eh?"
"Absolutely! It was the contrast between you and her that made me see things as they are—twenty blocks, I walked—and such a change!"
"Fancy!"
"When I was thinking I might as well die, I said, 'If he were in trouble today, I'd be tender and kind to him. But when I cried out to him, what I got was no faith—no help—only suspicion.' All my devotion since I've known you—it counted for nothing the moment you knew something was wrong. And I was half-crazy with fear just at the thought of losing you." Her look said that she had no such fear now.
He shifted his feet uneasily.
"Then I said to myself, 'Why, you poor thing, it's only a question of time when you'd lose him anyhow.' Even if we married, Felix, we wouldn't be happy long. It would be like living over a charge of dynamite. Any minute our home might blow up."
He smiled loftily. "And Miss—er—What's-her-name, she fixed everything?"
"She helped me! I've never met anyone just like her before. I've met plenty of the holier-than-thou variety. That's the only sort I knew before I ran away from my husband." She was finding relief in talking so frankly. "Then there's Tottie's kind—ugh! But Miss Milo is the new kind—a woman with a fair attitude toward other women; with a generous attitude toward mistakes even. That old lady you saw go in—she's so good that she'd send me to the stake." She laughed. "But her daughter—if she knew that I had sinned as much as you have, she'd treat me even better than she'd treat you."
"You'll be a militant next," he observed sneeringly.
"Oh, I'm one already! But I'm not blaming anything on anybody else. For whatever's gone wrong, I can just thank myself. All these ten years, I've taken the attitude that I mustn't be discovered—that I must hide, hide, hide. I have been living over a charge of dynamite, and I set it myself. I've been afraid of a scarecrow that I dressed myself.