“Miss Beggs never spoke any harm of you.”
She made a gesture, hopeless, impatient, at his innocence. Her resentment burst out again, “Why does she want to speak to you—another woman’s husband? Anybody knows it’s low down. When did you see her? What did you talk about?”
“Of course when I see her coming I ought to go ’round by South Fork,” he replied, heavily sarcastic.
“Well, you don’t have to stand and talk like I warrant you do. There’s something deep about her look.”
“I’ve taken care of myself for some years, and I guess I can keep on.”
“You can if you want to go to ruin, like you were when I married you, and you only had one shirt to your name.”
“Throw it up to me. It’s no wonder a man drinks here, he’s got more to forget than to think about.” He stepped from the porch, preparing to leave.
“Wait!” she commanded; “I’ll put up with being left, and having you drink all night with the beasts, and fooling my money away, but,” her voice rose and her eyes burned over dark shadows, “I won’t put up with another woman, I won’t put up with that thin thing making over my husband. I won’t! I won’t! do you understand that.... I—I can’t.”
He went around the corner of the house with her last words ringing in his ears, kicking angrily at the rough sod. His house, between Mrs. Caley’s glum silence and Lettice’s ceaseless complaining, was becoming uninhabitable. And, as Rutherford Berry had pointed out, the latter would only increase, sharpen, with the years. Lettice was a good wife, she was not like Nickles’ old woman, worthless but the pleasantest body you’d meet in a day on a horse. She was not like Meta Beggs. He had never seen any other like the latter. Lettice had said that she would fool him all over the mountain ... but not him, not Gordon Makimmon, he thought complacently.
He was well versed in the ways of women; he would not go a step that he did not intend, understand. This business of Paris, for example: he might tell Meta Beggs that he’d go, and then, at—say, Norfolk, he would change his mind. Anyhow that was a plan worth considering. He recalled the school-teacher’s level, penetrating gaze; she was as smart as Lettice had divined; he would have difficulty in fooling her. He felt obscurely that any step taken with her would prove irrevocable.