“I thought he was very nice, and good-looking, too. He’s not a bit like Cornelia Ryan, or his mother, either. Cornelia has such red hair.”
“No, looks like the old man. Good deal like him in character, too. Con Ryan was the best feller in the world, but not hard enough, not enough grit. His wife had it though, had enough for both. If it hadn’t been for her, Con would never have amounted to anything—too soft and good-natured, and the boy’s like him.”
“How?” She raised her head and looked directly at him, her lips slightly parted.
“Soft, too, just the same way, soft-hearted. An easy mark for any one with a hard-luck story and not too many scruples. Why did he marry that woman? I don’t know anything about it, but I’d like to bet she saw the stuff he was made of and cried and teased and nagged till she got him to do it.”
“I don’t see that he could have done anything else.”
“That’s a woman’s—a young girl’s view. That’s the view Dominick himself probably took. It’s the sort of idea you might expect him to have, something ornamental and impractical, that’s all right to keep in the cupboard and take out and dust, but that don’t do for every-day use. That sort of thing is all very well for a girl, but it doesn’t do for a man. It’s not for this world and our times. Maybe it was all right when a feller went round in armor, fighting for unknown damsels, but it won’t go in California to-day. The woman was a working woman, she wasn’t any green girl. She earned her living in an office full of men, and I guess there wasn’t much she didn’t know. She saw through Dominick and gathered him in. It’s all very well to be chivalrous, but you don’t want to be a confounded fool.”
“Are you a ‘confounded fool’ when you’re doing what you think right?”
“It depends on what you think right, honey. If it’s going to break up your life, cut you off from your kind, make an outcast of you from your own folks, and a poverty-stricken outcast at that, you’re a confounded fool to think it’s right. You oughtn’t to let yourself think so. That kind of a moral attitude is a luxury. Women can cultivate it because they don’t have to get out in the world and fight. They keep indoors and get taken care of, and the queer ideas they have don’t hurt anybody. But men——”
He stopped, realizing that perhaps he was talking too frankly. He had long known that Rose harbored these Utopian theories on duty and honor, which he thought very nice and pretty for her and which went gracefully with her character as a sheltered, cherished, and unworldly maiden. It was his desire to see what effect the conversation was having on her that made him deal so unceremoniously with ideals of conduct which were all very well for Bill Cannon’s daughter but were ruinous for Dominick Ryan.
“If you live in the world you’ve got to cut your cloth by its measure,” he continued. “Look at that poor devil, tied to a woman that’s not going to let him go if she can help it, that he doesn’t care for——”