Instead, she seemed to shift the subject.
“I envy you your freedom, Bardek,” she sighed. “When you want a thing, you just go and take it. If you want to cut loose you can say, ‘Let her go, Gallagher’ and boomp! you’re at the bottom. It takes courage, I tell you. One has to just stop caring for everybody and what everybody thinks. I can’t. I can’t be free. I’d like to break away and, if I wanted to, eat my breakfast in the middle of Main street—in my bare feet, too; but I couldn’t do it. Not that I care an awful lot about what folks say. It isn’t exactly that; but I’d be scared stiff. I might get as far as Main street with my oatmeal and roll, but my teeth would be chattering so much from fright that I couldn’t get the breakfast down.”
Bardek thought the matter over carefully. Then he eyed her seriously and asked:
“Something in your mind, it troubles you, eh?”
“Oh, no.”
He was not convinced.
“When you have great troubles, tell somebody. Confession is good. That what makes ol’ Mac such a fine man. He is always clean, is ol’ Mac. Every Saturday night he stand in line and think of the bad in him—it is not much, but no matter—then he soon be on his knees to tell the father and when he come out he is all w’ite-wash inside. Ol’ Mac, his mind is not always full of dead matters and ferments and things that go bad. His mind is like my house after Mrs. Mac have come to slop hot soap-water over everyt’ing. I know. Sometimes I, too, go to father and tell him everything.... No troubles, eh?”
“Oh, nothing’s the matter with me, Bardek; that is, nothing worth telling.”
“Very well,” he nodded. “When you make confession you must want to do it. Your inside will tell you it is time when.”
“That’s just what I want to know, Bardek,” she brought him back. “You listen to what the ‘inside’ bids you do, and you never question what the ‘outside’ would say. That’s freedom. I wish I had it.”