"Better let me," said Jim.
"No," said Pen, "every woman has an inalienable right to bully and intimidate her own husband."
Jim laughed and left her, reluctantly. Pen went into the tent. Sara was looking flushed and tired. The look had been growing on him of late. He had been unusually tractable for a day or so and Pen's heart smote her as she greeted him. No matter how he tried her, Sara never ceased to be a pitiful and a tragic figure to her in his wrecked and aborted youth.
"Sara," she said, her voice very gentle and her touch very tender as she held a glass of water for him, "Jim wanted to come in and talk to you but I wouldn't let him."
Sara pushed the glass away. "Why not?"
"Because you and he quarrel so. Sara, it's a fair fight. You warned Jim that you would ruin him. He says you may have your choice of being watched or turned over to the authorities."
"He is a mutton head!" said Sara. "I suppose he thinks the crux of the matter is that séance with Freet. As if I'd do as coarse work as that! That's what I'd like, to be turned over to the authorities. Couldn't I tell a pretty story about the meeting with Freet up here? Freet actually thought Jim would come across with the contract! But that wasn't what I was after."
"Sara, when you talk like that, I despise you," said Pen.
"You despise me because I'm a cripple," returned Sara. "Why can't you be honest about it?"
"Don't you know me yet, Sara?" asked Pen, sitting down on the foot of his couch and looking at him entreatingly. "Don't you know that if you had taken your injury like a man, you'd have gotten a hold on my tenderness and respect that nothing could have destroyed? Sara, I've watched you degenerate for eight years, but I never realized to what a depth you had sunk until you came to the Project."