“Why should I?”
“That’s right—why should you, when it comes to that? I’m not sure that I should if it were the other way about But one thing is sure——”
“Need we discuss these matters at all? I don’t see why. This whole situation is not in the least of my making, or my liking.”
“Oh, now, listen, Mrs. Haddon! I know a lot of things. I’m not what you are—I never had your chance. I’ve done the best I could with what I had, the same as you, maybe. If I had married him you’d never have taken him away from me!”
“Indeed?” Her auditor did not even smile.
“Women like you,” broke out Polly, waxing somewhat tremulous herself—“women like you don’t know anything about women like me. I didn’t run after Jimmy Haddon—he ran after me. Why did he? What made him? Didn’t you have every chance in the world to keep him? Who’s to blame—me or you or him—or all of us? I wasn’t running after him so much even now. Of course I didn’t know anything about what has happened, or I wouldn’t have come.”
Marcia’s hands were intertwining nervously now. “Do you think I ought to talk to you at all now—coming here as you do—following him absolutely into his grave?”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Polly, coloring hotly now. “Maybe I’m not as bad as you think—or anyway, different. If men drift to my sort, how can my sort help it? I’m only a rag and a bone and a hank my own self, I suppose. If it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else, maybe. If it hadn’t been me, maybe it would have been someone else for him too—that’s the way it goes.”
Marcia Haddon was looking at the young woman before her with a new and strange feeling of curiosity, trying after her own ancient creed to be fair, to be just. She was trying now to understand, to find as much good as possible in the careless self-accusation of the young person who spoke thus artlessly and directly. But that young person went on now somewhat bitterly.
“We’re a good ways apart, Mrs. Haddon, I expect I hadn’t a thing to start with but my laugh and my looks—they would have left me comfortable if I’d never met your husband. If he’s gone now, all the better for me now, like enough, and all the better for him—and maybe for you too. You don’t know about my sort. Well, I don’t ask that of you. There’s milk, and fresh milk, and bottled milk, and certified bottled milk. You’re strictly respectable—you’re certified—you’re the sort that’s been taken care of all their lives. Me—I’m uncertified, I guess. It doesn’t make much difference to anybody now, does it? I told—him—another man—I was going over with the Red Cross.”