"Why don't you feel right?"
"Because ... because it means that you are giving me everything and I'm giving nothing in return."
"Don't think that, ma'am," with a slow, convinced shaking of his head, "I'm doin' little enough for what I get."
"For what you get!"
"What I get, ma'am, is this. I can come to see you. I can look at your face, I can see your hair, I can watch you move an' hear you talk an' be near you now an' then, even if I ain't any right, even if ..."
He threw out his arms and let them fall back to his thighs as he turned from her again.
"That's what I get in exchange," he continued a moment later. "That's my pay, an' for it, I'd go through anything, thirst or hunger or cold ... anythin', ma'am. That's how much I think of you: that's why carin' for ... for that man out home ain't any job even if he is ... if you are his!"
On that, doubt, desire, again overrode her training, her traditional manner of thought. She struggled to find words, but she could not even clarify her ideas. Impressions came to her in hot, passing flashes. A dozen times she was on the point of crying out, of telling him one thing or another, but each time the thought was gone before she could seize upon and crystallize it. All she fully realized was that this thing was love, big, clean, sanctified; that this man was a natural lover of women, with a body as great, as fine as the heart which could so reveal itself to her; and that in spite of that love's quality she was helpless, bound, gagged even, by the circumstances that life had thrown about her. She would have cried out against them, denouncing it all ...
Only for the fact that that thing, conscience, handed down to her through strict-living generations, kept her still, binding her to silence, to passivity.
"I won't bother you again this way," she heard him saying, his voice sounding unreal as it forced its way through the roaring in her head. "I had to get it out of my system, or it'd have gone in some other direction; reaction, they call it, I guess. Then, somebody'd have been hurt or somethin' broken, maybe your heart,"—looking at her with his patient smile.