He stirred in his chair and broke another biscuit in half.
"Believe me, I know, Bayard! I've been there. I.... Hell, I married a girl with a conscience,"—drawling the words, "That's the kind that hangs on when they get you ... that good kind! She's too damn fine for human use, she and her kind. You know," ... laughing bitterly—"she started out to reform me. One of that kind; get me? A damned straight-laced Puritan! She snivelled and prayed and, instead of helping me, she just drove me on and on. She's got me. See? I can't get away from her and the only good thing about being here is that there are miles between us and I don't hear her cant and prating!"
"Seems to me that a woman who sticks by a man when he goes clean to hell must amount to something," observed Bayard, gazing at him pointedly.
Lytton shrugged his shoulders.
"Maybe ... in some ways, but who the devil wants that kind hanging around his neck?" He pushed his plate away and stared surlily out through the door. Bayard tilted back in his chair and looked the Easterner in the face critically.
"Suppose somebody was to come along an' tell you they was goin' to take her off your hands. What'd you say then?"
"What do you mean?" disgruntled at the challenge in Bayard's query.
"Just what I say. You've been tellin' me what a bad mess mixin' with women is. I'm askin' you what you'd do if somebody tried to take your woman. You say it's bad, bein' tied up. How about it, if somebody was to step in an' relieve you?"
The other moved in his chair.
"That's different," he said. "To want to be away from a woman until she got some common sense, and to have another man take your wife are two different things. To have a man take your wife would make anybody want to kill, no matter what trouble you might have had with her. Breaking up marriages, taking something that belongs to another man, has nothing to do with what I was talking about."