She met his enchanted gaze with a slow, red-lipped smile. To me she gave an embarrassed, half-sidewise glance. Strange men as yet were evidently disturbing items in her life.
He watched her when she left us, until she had passed through the kitchen-door and beyond sight. "I'm going to marry and settle down," he said.
"This young lady?"
"If she'll have me. I haven't asked her yet." He was fiddling with his bread and butter. Suddenly he burst out with: "If you knew how lonesome I used to get, and the things I was tempted to do to forget it!"
"A man doesn't need, son, to be entirely exiled from his family to believe that; but when you're married will you go to sea just the same?" I asked.
He did not answer.
I felt sorry for him. She looked to be a good girl, but I foresaw her troubles in a place like this while he would be away to sea. It would be a constant fight. She was possibly nineteen; she didn't look like a girl who had been tempered by temptation's long siege, and Lord knows what resisting power she would develop when so tempted.
From the fragments Drislane fed me with while she was coming and going, I learned that both her parents were dead, that she had been in the city only three months, that her uncle didn't seem to see anything strange in her employment in his place, and that Drislane was the first man who had shown an honest interest in her. "I take her to the theatre regularly," said Drislane. "I would to-night, only I want to sit in somewhere and have a long talk with her. You'd be surprised the things she doesn't know about the world."
"I wonder," I thought to myself, "if you realize the things you don't know about the world," and began to wish then for his own sake that he'd hurry up and take to looking at life through the same glasses other people used.
She was living in sordid quarters in a section where a woman was any man's who could get her, and on any terms he could get her; and she was of the type and at the age which has always been held most desirable by the primitive male; and it was to be doubted if she had had the religious or home training needful to an emotional nature. In a good home, in a community where a woman was respected because she was a woman, all would have been fine; but here—they married, and he most of the time at sea—I felt sorry for her as well as for him.