"Yes," said Ordway, and to his annoyance he felt himself flush painfully at the sound of his own voice.
"You spent last night with him?" she inquired in her energetic tones.
"Yes."
As he stood there in his cheap clothes, with his dishevelled hair and his unwashed hands, she was struck by some distinction of personality, before which these surface roughnesses appeared as mere incidental things. Was it in his spare, weather-beaten face? Or was it in the peculiar contrast between his gray hair and his young blue eyes? Then her gaze fell on his badly made working clothes, worn threadbare in places, on his clean striped shirt, frayed slightly at the collar and cuffs, on his broken fingernails, and on the red clay still adhering to his country boots.
"I wonder why you do these things?" she asked so softly that the words hardly reached him. "I wonder why?"
Though she had expected no response to her question, to her surprise he answered almost impulsively as he stooped to pick up a bit of charred wood from the floor.
"Well, one must fill one's life, you know," he said. "I tried the other thing once but it didn't count—it was hardly better than this, when all is said."
"What 'other thing' do you mean?"
"When I spoke I was thinking of what people have got to call 'pleasure,'" he responded, "getting what one wants in life, or trying to get it and failing in the end."
"And did you fail?" she asked, with a simplicity which saved the blunt directness of the question.