The Bonanza King was moved. The facile tears of women did not affect him, but the tears of this bold, hard, unbreakable creature, whom he had regarded only as an antagonist to be vanquished, stirred him to a sort of abashed sympathy. There was something singularly pathetic about the completeness of her breakdown. She, who had been so audacious an adversary, now in all her crumpled finery weeping into his handkerchief, was so entirely and utterly a feeble, crushable thing.
“Come, brace up,” he said cheeringly. “We can’t do any talking while you’re acting this way. What’s the proposition again?”
“I want some money and I want to go.” She raised her head and lowered the handkerchief, speaking with a strained, throaty insistence like a child. “I can’t live here any more. I can’t bear it. It would give a prize fighter nervous prostration. I can’t bear it.” Her voice grew small and high. “Really I can’t,” she managed to articulate, and then dissolved into another flood.
The old man, high in his swivel chair, sat with his hands in his pockets, his lips pursed and his eyes on the floor. Once or twice he whirled the chair slightly from one side to the other. After a pause of some minutes he said,
“Are you prepared to agree to everything Mrs. Ryan and I demanded?”
After the last outbreak she had completely abandoned herself to the hysterical condition that was beyond her control. Now she made an effort to recover herself, sat up, swallowing and gasping, while she wiped her eyes.
“I’m ready to do it all,” she sniffed, “only—only—” she paused on the verge of another collapse, suppressed it, and said with some show of returning animation, “only I must have some money now—a guarantee.”
“Oh,” he said with the descending note of comprehension. “As I remember, we agreed to pay you seven thousand dollars for the first year, the year of desertion.”
She lowered the handkerchief entirely, presenting to him a disfigured face, all its good looks gone, but showing distinct signs of attention.
“I don’t want the seven thousand. I’ll waive it. I want a sum down, a guarantee, an advance. You offered me at first fifty thousand dollars. Give me that down and I’ll go this afternoon.”