"It might have been once, but it isn't any more."
"Why not?"
"I suppose it is because I left a good many things behind me when I ran away—besides the man I thought was dead. In that other life I never knew what it meant to fight for the things I wanted; perhaps it was because I never wanted anything very badly, or possibly it was because the things I did want came too easily."
"They are not coming so easily now?"
"No; but I'm going to have them at any cost. You will know what I mean when I say that nothing, not even human life, seems so sacred to me as it used to."
"Have you ever talked with daddy about all these things?"
"No. You don't know men very well; they don't talk about such things to one another. The average man tells some woman, if he can be lucky enough to find one who will listen."
"You haven't told me all of it," she said, after another hesitant pause. "You have carefully left the woman out of it. Was she pretty?"
Smith buried his laugh so deep that not a flicker of it came to the surface.
"Is that the open inference always?—that a man tries to kill another because there is a woman in it?"