“I do love you,” she repeated. She arose and took a step toward him, though her limbs were trembling so that they seemed unable to sustain her weight. “Harboro!” she called as he laid his hand on the door. “Harboro! I want you to listen to me.” She sank back into her chair, and Harboro turned and faced her again wonderingly.
“If you’d try to understand,” she pleaded. “I’m not going to ask you to stay. I only want you to understand.” She would not permit her emotions to escape bounds. Something that was courageous and honorable in her forbade her to appeal to his pity alone; something that was shrewd in her warned her that such a course would be of no avail.
“You see, I was what people call a bad woman when you first met me. Perhaps you know that now?”
“Go on,” he said.
“But that’s such a silly phrase—a bad woman. Do you suppose I ever felt like a bad woman—until now? Even now I can’t realize that the words belong to me, though I know that according to the rules I’ve done you a bad turn, Harboro.”
She rocked in silence while she gained control over her voice.
“What you don’t know,” she said finally, “is how things began for me, in those days back in San Antonio, when I was growing up. It’s been bad luck with me always; or if you don’t believe in luck, then everything has been a kind of trick played on me from the beginning. Not by anybody—I don’t mean that. But by something bigger. There’s the word Destiny....” She began to wring her hands nervously. “It seems like telling an idle tale. When you frame the sentences they seem to have existed in just that form always. I mean, losing my mother when I was twelve; and the dreadful poverty of our home and its dulness, and the way my father sat in the sun and seemed unable to do anything. I don’t believe he was able to do anything. There’s the word Destiny again. We lived in what’s called the Mexican section, where everybody was poor. What’s the meaning of it; there being whole neighborhoods of people who are hungry half the time?
“I was still nothing but a child when I began to notice how others escaped from poverty a little—the Mexican girls and women I lived among. It seemed to be expected of them. They didn’t think anything of it at all. It didn’t make any difference in their real selves, so far as you could see. They went on going to church and doing what little tasks they could find to do—just like other women. The only precaution they took when a man came was to turn the picture of the Virgin to the wall....”
Harboro had sat down again and was regarding her darkly.
“I don’t mean that I felt about it just as they did when I got older. You see, they had their religion to help them. They had been taught to call the thing they did a sin, and to believe that a sin was forgiven if they went and confessed to the priest. It seemed to make it quite simple. But I couldn’t think of it as a sin. I couldn’t clearly understand what sin meant, but I thought it must be the thing the happy people were guilty of who didn’t give my father something to do, so that we could have a decent place to live in. You must remember how young I was! And so what the other girls called a sin seemed to me ... oh, something that was untidy—that wasn’t nice.”