“What?”
The girl repeated, without fear, what she had said.
And nothing had ever cowed Ravant as that did. It made him stop and think. It seemed as if he had never thought before—so primitive were his processes.
“I’ll just live up to that girl’s estimate of me—and fool her. I really thought I was a pig. Heavens!” He laughed with himself as if he were some one else. “It didn’t even offend me! But I’m glad I’m not a pig—to her—and I’ll stop being a brute. Especially to women. What was it mother used to say?”
Finally he remembered it:
“Always be gentle to all women. For some of them are mothers, and all of them are daughters of mothers.”
He said to himself that he had better write that out in a plain hand and paste it in his hat. Then he said he would go the hat one better—he would write it out and paste it in his head.
And I think he did this in some fashion. For he often remembered it. And at this time it was hard for him to remember things.
“Please!” she begged of him one day with her hands out to his, meaning that he should intermit his ceaseless watching of her. “I feel like the insect under the microscope.” She ended with that brief, halfway laugh.
“I won’t,” said Ravant. “It helps me. And that is what you are paid for doing.”