"But if it isn't work, it must be something. A girl as strong as you doesn't collapse without a reason."
She dropped her hands and sat up. Her face was brought on a level with his, the swollen eyes blinking through tears, the mouth twisted and pitiful.
"It's pain, it's pain, Charlie," she quavered.
"Then you are sick," he said, now thoroughly alarmed.
"No—it's not my body, it's my heart. It's here." She clasped her hands over her heart, and suddenly closing her eyes rocked back and forth. "A little while ago I was so happy. I never was like that before—every minute of the day lovely. And then it was all changed, it all ended. I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't believe it. I kept saying 'it'll come all right, nothing so awful could happen to anyone.' But it could—it did. And it's that that's made me this way—to be so full of joy and then to have it snatched away. It's too much, Charlie. Even I couldn't stand it—I who once thought nothing could beat me."
Crowder had had a wide experience in exhibitions of human suffering, but he had never seen anything quite like this. Tenderness was not what was needed, and, his eyes stern on her working face, he said with quiet authority:
"Pancha, I don't get what this means. Now, like a good girl, tell me.
I've got to know."
Then and there, without more urging, she told him.
She told her story truthfully as far as she went, but she did not go to the end. All the preceding night, the interview with Mayer, had repeated itself in her memory, bitten itself in in every brutal detail. Hate trailed after it a longing to repay in kind and she saw herself impotent. The threat of her father's championship, snatched at in blind rage, she knew meant nothing, the boast of "getting square" was empty. Subtlety was her only weapon and now in her confession to Crowder she employed it. What she told of Mayer's conduct was true, but she did not tell what to her was a mitigating circumstance—the counter-attraction of Chrystie. The lure of money was to this child of poverty an excuse for her lover's desertion. Even Crowder, her friend, might condone a transfer of affection from Pancha Lopez to the daughter of George Alston. So the young man, hearing the story ended, saw Mayer as Pancha intended him to—a blackguard, breaking a girl's heart for pastime.
"The dog!" he muttered. "The cur! Why didn't you tell me? I'd have sized him up for you."