"I tell you that, except for a mere glimpse the other day, I never saw her but once before in my life; and that before that time I had never even heard the name; and that, since then, I had never heard of her or seen her till to-day."
Her gaze fairly pierced to his inner self. "You wouldn't lie to me—I know that," she said abruptly. "But she's got some hold on you; she means something in your life—don't she?"
"I've told you all I can tell you," David answered firmly.
She exploded. "I hate her! You hear me?—I hate her!"
He did not answer, and they walked on to the eastward in silence, through streets effervescent with playing children. In Tompkin's Square they sat down on one of the benches which edged both sides of the curving walks and which were filled with husbands, wives, lovers, German and Jewish and Magyar, who had come out for an hour or two of the soft October air. David tried to draw Kate into casual conversation, but she remained silent, and soon they rose and walked on. After several blocks the window of a delicatessen store showed him she was more composed, and he again offered her his arm. She now took it.
Presently they saw the gleam of water at the end of the street, and continuing they came out upon a dock. It was crowded with trucks, and against its one side creakingly rubbed a scow loaded with ashes and against its other a scow ridged high with empty tin cans. Sitting in the tails of some of the trucks were parlourless lovers—their courtship flanked by garbage, presided over by the odour of stables. They did not break their embraces as David and Kate brushed by them and passed on to the end of the dock.
Kate sank upon the heavy end timber and gazed at the surging tide-river that swept along under the moonlight. It came to David, who leaned against a snubbing-post at her side, that this was the very dock on which he had stood on New Year's eve; and half his mind was thinking of the hopelessness of that night and of the bitter days preceding it, when a whispered "David" reached up to him.
He glanced down. The moon, which dropped full into her face, revealed no hardness—showed appealing eyes and a mouth that rippled at its corners.
"What is it?" he asked.
"I hate her—yes." Her voice flamed slightly up with its old fire, but it immediately subsided into tremulous appeal. "But I had no right to talk to you like I did. I can't brag about what I've been, you know."