She was silent for a moment. Then she said:
“’Tis to a convent I should have gone, Davie, instead of to the public—to run with boys, and with you. ’Twas you taught me things a girl shouldn’t know.”
“I?” said David, still more horror-stricken.
“’Tis so. I was a woman grown whilst you were yet but a boy. You didn’t know. If your lady mother had lived she might have told you more about girls and women. I was loving you, Davie, long before ever you put a razor to your face.”
For the first time in his life David the man found it easeful and fitting to curse David the boy. “Warm-hearted,” he had called Judith in those other days, and thought no more of it. But now ... he had been as one who tosses a careless match aside and passes on, only to turn and find a forest ablaze.
“Tell me what you care to, Glo,” he said gravely.
“’Tis an old story, I’m thinking. Whilst I could be writing to you and knowing you’d be coming back from the college the bad heart of me kept still. But when you went to that place in Florida the bad heart was empty—empty for a man. The man came, Davie; I’m thinking he always comes.”
David had to moisten his lips before he could say: “Who was it, Glo?”
“’Twas young Tommy Judson.”
“God!” said David. The exclamation was half prayer and half execration. He knew Judson; all Middleboro knew him as the country town’s most faithful imitation of gilded youth and its degeneracy. After a time he said: “Somebody ought to kill him, Glo; I ought to kill him.”