"How long did it last?"
"My marriage? Going on eighteen years. She was down on Long Island for the last ten of them."
"Then you lived with her eight. Was she always—always-"
"Took it before I ever married her, and I found it out in a month. She wasn't so much to blame as you might think," he pursued thoughtfully. "You see she had a tough time of it, and she was little and weak, and everything was against her. She came out West first to teach school, and then she got mixed up with some skunk of a man who pretended to marry her when he had a wife living in Chicago, and after that I guess she went on taking a dope just to keep up her spirits and ease the pain of some spinal trouble she'd had since she was a child. There was nothing bad in her—she was just weak—and I began to feel sorry for her, and so I did it. If I had it to do over again, I'm not so sure I'd act differently. She was a poor little creature that didn't have any man to look after her, and I was just muddling along anyway, thinking about money. Heaven knows what would have become of her if I hadn't happened along when I did."
He had lifted his head toward the light, while he ran his hand through his hair, and again she saw the look, so like spiritual exaltation, transfigure his face. Before this man, who had sprung from poverty and dirt, who had struggled up by his own force, overcoming and triumphing, fighting and winning, fighting and holding, fighting and losing, but always fighting—before this man, who had been born in a cellar, she felt suddenly humbled. Without friends, without knowledge, except the bitter knowledge of the streets, he had fought his fight, and had kept untarnished a certain hardy standard of honour. Beside this tremendous achievement she weighed his roughness, his ignorance of books and of the superficial conventions, and she realized how little these things really mattered—how little any outside things mattered in the final judgment of life. She thought of George, dying a drunkard's death in the room at the end of the hail—of George whose way had been smoothed for him from birth, who had taken everything that he had wanted.
"I wish there was something I could do for you—something to help you," she said impetuously. "But I never saw any one who seemed to need help so little."
His face brightened, and she saw that her words had brought a touching wistfulness into his eyes.
"Well, if you'd let me come and talk to you sometimes" he answered shyly. "There're a lot of things I'd like to talk to you about—things I don't know, things I do know, and things I half know."
From the brilliant look she turned on him, he understood that he must have given her pleasure, and she saw the smile return to his face.
"I'll tell you everything I know and welcome," she replied readily; "but that isn't much. Better than that, I'll read to you."