As his voice ceased the rosy clouds faded, and she realized again the faded, musty little room, the calico-covered furniture, and looking down at her own cheap and ill-fitting dress, she saw her ugly hands lying there. Then she cried out with a gush of tears:
"Oh, Will, I'm so old and homely now, I ain't fit to go with you now! Oh, why couldn't we have married then?"
She was seeing herself as she was then, and so was he; but it deepened his resolution. How beautiful she used to be! He seemed to see her there as if she stood in perpetual sunlight, with a warm sheen in her hair and dimples in her cheeks.
She saw her thin red wrists, her gaunt and knotted hands. There was a pitiful droop in the thin, pale lips, and the tears fell slowly from her drooping lashes. He went on:
"Well, it's no use to cry over what was. We must think of what we're going to do. Don't worry about your looks; you'll be the prettiest woman in the country when we get back. Don't wait, Aggie; make up your mind."
She hesitated, and was lost.
"What will people say?"
"I don't care what they say," he flamed out. "They'd say, stay here and be killed by inches. I say you've had your share of suffering. They'd say—the liberal ones—stay and get a divorce; but how do you know we can get one after you've been dragged through the mud of a trial? We can get one as well in some other state. Why should you be worn out at thirty? What right or justice is there in making you bear all your life the consequences of our—my schoolboy folly?"
As he went on his argument rose to the level of Browning's philosophy.
"We can make this experience count for us yet. But we mustn't let a mistake ruin us—it should teach us. What right has any one to keep you in a hole? God don't expect a toad to stay in a stump and starve if it can get out. He don't ask the snakes to suffer as you do."