“See here, Mary-Clare, I’ve caught on. You never cared for me. You married me from what you called duty; your sense of decency held until your own comfort and pleasure got in between––then you were ready to fling me off like an old mit and term it by high-sounding names. Now comes along this stranger, from God knows where, looking about for the devil knows what––and taking what lies about in order to pass the time. I haven’t lived in the world for nothing, Mary-Clare. Now lay this along with the other woman-thoughts you’re so fond of. I’m going upstairs, for I’m tired and all-fired disgusted, but remember, what I can’t hold, no other man is going to get, not even for a little time while he hangs about. Folks are going to see just what is going on, 54 believe me! I’m going to leave all the doors and windows open. I’m going to give you your head, but I’ll keep hold of the reins.”
And then, because it was all so hideously wrong and twisted and comical, Mary-Clare laughed! She laughed noiselessly, until the tears dimmed her eyes. Larry watched her uneasily.
“Oh, Larry,” she managed her voice at last, “I never knew that anything so dreadfully wrong could be made of nothing. You’ve created a terrible something, and I wonder if you know it?”
“That’s enough!” Larry strode toward the stairway. “Your husband’s no fool, my girl, and the cheap, little, old tricks are plain enough to him.”
Mary-Clare watched her husband pass from view; heard him tramp heavily in the room above. She sat by the dead fire and thought of him as she first knew him––knew him? Then her eyes widened. She had never known him; she had taken him as she had taken all that her doctor had left to her, and she had failed; failed because she had not thought her woman’s thought until it was too late.
After all her high aims and earnest endeavour to meet this critical moment in her life Mary-Clare acknowledged, as she sat by the ash-strewn hearth, that it had degenerated into a cheap and almost comic farce. To her narrow vision her problem seemed never to have been confronted before; her world of the Forest would have no sympathy for it, or her; Larry had reduced it to the ugliest aspect, and by so doing had turned her thoughts where they might never have turned and upon the stranger who might always have remained a stranger.
Alone in the deadly quiet room, the girl of Mary-Clare passed from sight and the woman was supreme; a little hard, in order to combat the future: quickened to a futile sense of injustice, but young enough, even at that moment, to demand of life something vital; something better than the cruel thing that might evolve unless she bore herself courageously.
Unconsciously she was planning her course. She would 55 go her way with her old smile, her old outward bearing. A promise was a promise––she would never forget that, and as far as she could pay with that which was hers to give, she would pay, but outside of that she would not let life cheat her.
Bending toward the dead fire on the hearth, Mary-Clare made her silent covenant.