At the commencement of this speech, a surge of words had boiled up within Berny. Now as he stopped she leaned toward him and the words burst out of her lips.
“And what right has she got to act that way, I’d like to know? What’s she got against me? What’s wrong with me? Dominick Ryan married me of his own free will. He chose me and he was of age. I’d been a typewriter in the Merchants and Mechanics Trust Company, honestly earning my living. Is that what she don’t like about me? I might have got my living another way, a good sight easier and pleasanter, but I wasn’t that kind. Maybe she didn’t like a decent working-girl for her son’s wife? And what was she to kick? Didn’t you just say now she washed for the miners in Virginia? Didn’t she used to keep a two-room grocery at Shasta? I don’t see that there’s anything so darned aristocratic about that. There were no more diamond tiaras and crests on the harness in her early days than there are in mine. She’s forgetting old times. You can just tell her I’m not.”
She came to a breathless close, her body bent forward, her dark eyes burning with rage and excitement. This suddenly sank down, chilled, and, as it were, abashed by the aspect of her listener, who was sitting motionless in his chair, his hands clasped over the curving front of his torso, his chin sunk on his collar, and his eyes fixed upon her with a look of calm, ruminating attention. Her words had not only failed to heat him to controversy, but he had the air of patiently waiting for them to cease, when he could resume the matter under discussion.
“It’s natural enough that you should feel that way about it,” he said, “but let’s put out of the argument these purely personal questions. You think one way and Mrs. Ryan thinks another. We recognize that and assume that it is so. We’re not passing judgment. I’d be the last one to do that between two ladies. What I came to talk of to-day was not the past but the present; not the wrongs you’ve suffered from the Ryans, but the way they can be righted.”
“There’s only one way they can be righted,” she said.
“Well now, let’s see,” persuasively. “We’re both agreed that your position in San Francisco is hard. Here you are in the town where you were born and raised, leading a lonely life in what, considering your marriage, we might call reduced circumstances. You have—you’ll excuse my plain talking—little or no social position. Your life is monotonous and dull, when, at your age, it should be all brightness and pleasure. In the height of your youth and beauty you’re cramped in a small flat, deprived of the amusements of your age, ostracized from society, and pinched by lack of money. That seems to me a pretty mean position for a woman of your years and appearance.”
Berny made no answer. She was confused by his thus espousing her cause, using almost the words she herself would have used in describing her unmerited trials. She was one of those women who, with an almost unbreakable nerve, when attacked or enraged, tremble. She was seized now with this trembling and to control it clasped her hands tight in her lap and tried to hold her body stiff by will power.
“It is from this situation,” he went on, his voice slightly lowered, “that Mrs. Ryan offers to release you.”
A gleam of light zigzagged through the woman’s uncomprehension, and the trembling seemed to concentrate in her knees and stomach.
“To release me?” she repeated with a rising inflection.