There was what I have learned to call the light of all-wisdom in Polly's eyes when she answered.
"Oh, if one must lean altogether upon sheer logic and the pure materialism of this divided by that and multiplied by something else," she returned. "But there are two kinds of regeneration, Jimmie, dear; the kind which involves a radical change in the life-motive, and the other which is merely a stripping of the husks from a strong soul that never needed changing."
"Your love would put me where I don't belong," I protested humbly.
"No; not my love: what you are, and what you have done."
"What I am, you have made me; and what I have done you have suggested. No; the injustice, the prison, the brand of the convict, the dodging and evading, the knowledge that, if the truth were to be blazoned abroad, I could never hope to recross the chasm which Judge Haskins's sentence had opened between me and the world at large; these things made a shuddering coward of me—which I was not in the beginning. It was this prison-bred cowardice that made me potentially Kellow's murderer, willing in heart and mind, and waiting only for the firing spark of provocation. It was the same cowardice that made me Agatha Geddis's slave, and very nearly her murderer. Worse still, it sent me to you with sealed lips when I should have told you all that you had a right to know."
"Well? If you will have it so, what then?"
"Only this: that the brand which the law put upon the man wasn't any sign of the cross to make a new creature of him, as you have been trying to make me believe. That's all."
Polly's smile is a thing to make any man tingle to the roots of his hair. "As if the past, or anything in it, could make any difference to us now!" she chided. "Haven't we learned to say:
'Not heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour'?
Beloved man, I'm hungry; and it's miles and miles to dinner. Shall we go?"