She had been, people said, a fool to put up with such behavior. But what was she to do? There were the children and there was her own devotion to John Conyngham, a thing which he had thrown carelessly aside. It wasn’t even as if you suffered in secret: in the Town a thing like that couldn’t be kept a secret. The very newsboys knew of it. She had found a sort of salvation in working with Irene Shane. People said she was crazy, a woman with two small children, to go about working among Hunkies and Dagoes; but she took good care of her children, too, and she supplied the people in the Flats with what no amount of such mystical devotion as Irene Shane could supply: she had a sound practical head.
She was an odd girl (she thought) when you came to consider it, with a kind of curse on her. She had to have some one to whom she could give herself up completely, pouring out all the soul in a fantastic devotion. John Conyngham had tired of it, perhaps (she sometimes thought) because he was a cold, hard, sensual man who had no need for such a thing. A woman like Mamie Rhodes (she thought bitterly) suited him better. If she had been married to Philip, who needed it so pathetically....
In the long nights of vigil, she thought round and round in circles, over the same paths again and again.... And before many nights had passed she found herself coming back always to the thing she knew and tried constantly to forget ... that it had been Philip whom she loved always, since those very first days in the tree-house. It seemed to her that at twenty-eight her life, save for her children, was already at an end. She was a widow with only memories of an unhappy married life behind her and nothing to hope for in the future. Philip was married and, so Krylenko told her, about to have a child of his own. She didn’t even know whether he even thought of her. And yet, she told herself, fiercely, she did know. He had belonged to her always, and she knew it more than ever while they had sat on the bridge, during that solitary walk into the open country.
Philip was hers, and he was such a fool that he would never know it. He was always lost in mooning about things that didn’t matter. She could save him: she could set straight his muddles and moonings. He needed some one who thought less of God and more of making a good pie and keeping his socks darned.
She herself had never thought much about God save when her children were born and her husband died, and even then she had been only brushed by a consciousness of some vast and overwhelming personal force. Life, even with its pain, seemed a satisfactory affair: there was always so much to be done, and it wasn’t God that Philip needed but pies and socks and a woman who believed in him.
She knew every day whether he was better or worse and she found herself, for the first time in all her life, praying to God to spare his life. She didn’t know whether there was a God or whether He would listen to one who only petitioned when she was in need, but she prayed none the less, believing that if there was any God, He would understand why it was she turned to Him. If He did not understand, she told herself rebelliously, then He was not worthy of existing as God.
She did not go to the slate-colored house, though she did ask for news on one occasion when she met Emma in the street. She understood that Emma had resented her friendship for Philip, even when they were children, and so avoided seeming to show any great interest. But she heard, nevertheless, sometimes from Krylenko who had even gone to the door to inquire, and sometimes from the doctor, but most of the time it was McTavish who kept her informed.
McTavish was the only person whom she suspected of guessing her secret.
After she had stopped day after day at his undertaking-parlors, he looked at her sharply one day out of his humorous little blue eyes, and said, “If Philip gets better, we’ve got to help him.” Then he hesitated for a moment and added, “Those two women are very bad for him.”
He was, she understood, feeling his way. When she agreed, by not protesting, he went on, “You ought to have married him, Mary, when you had a chance.”