She had refused to use the chair he had shoved toward her. She stood beside it a little defiantly. Now she looked into his eyes with a kind of imperious reasonableness. “Whatever I was to you, Fectnor,” she said, “I became because I was forced into it.”
“I never forced you,” he responded stoutly.
“In one way, you didn’t; but just the same ... you had both hands reached out to seize me when I fell. You never tried to help me; you were always digging the pitfall under my feet. You were forever holding out your hand with money in it; and there was you on one side of me with your money, and my father on the other with his never-ending talk about poverty and debts and his fear of you—and you know you took pains to make him fear you—and his saying always that it wouldn’t make any difference in what people thought of me, whether I stood out against you or....” Her glance shifted and fell. There were some things she could not put into words.
“That’s book talk, Sylvia. Come out into the open. I know what the female nature is. You’re all alike. You all know when to lower your eyes and lift your fan and back into a corner. That’s the female’s job, just as it’s the male’s job to be bold and rough. But you all know to a hair how far to carry that sort of thing. You always stop in plenty of time to get caught.”
She looked at him curiously. “I suppose,” she said after a pause, “that roughly describes certain love-making processes. But it really wasn’t love-making between you and me, Fectnor. It was a kind of barter.”
His eyes seemed to snare hers relentlessly. “You’re not doing yourself justice, Sylvia,” he said. “You’re not one of the bartering kind. You’d have killed me—you’d have killed yourself—before you’d have let me touch you, if you hadn’t liked me. You know that’s a fact.”
The shadow of a frown darkened her brow. “There was a time when you had a kind of fascination for me. The way you had of making other men seem little and dumb, when you came in and spoke. You seemed so much alive. I noticed once that you didn’t count your change when you’d paid for some drinks. That was the way in everything you did. You seemed lavish with everything that was in you; you let the big things go and didn’t worry about the change. You were a big man in some ways, Fectnor. A girl needn’t have been ashamed of admiring you. But Fectnor ... I’ve come to see what a low life it was I was leading. In cases like that, what the woman yields is ... is of every possible importance to her, while the man parts only with his money.”
He smote the table with his fist. “I’m glad you said that,” he cried triumphantly. “There’s a lie in that, and I want to nail it. The man gives only his money, you say. Do you understand what that means where a hard-working devil is concerned? What has he got besides the few pennies he earns? When he gives his money, isn’t he giving his strength and his youth? Isn’t he giving his manhood? Isn’t he giving the things that are his for only a few years, and that he can’t get back again? I’m not talking about the dandies who have a lot of money they never earned. I should think a woman with as much as one bone in her body would take a shotgun to that sort whenever they came around. I’m talking about the fellows that sweat for what they get. A lot of mollycoddles and virtuous damn fools have built up that Sunday-school junk about the woman giving everything, and the man giving nothing. But I want to tell you it’s nip and tuck as to who gives the most. A woman takes a man’s money as if it grew on bushes. Go and watch him earn it, if you want to know what his part of the bargain is.”
She felt as if she were being crowded against a wall. She could not look at him. She groped for a weapon—for any weapon—with which to fight him. “That would sound a little more impressive, Fectnor,” she said, “if I didn’t know what brought you to Eagle Pass just now, and how you sweat for the pay you got.”
This was unfortunately said, for there was malice in it, and a measure of injustice. He heard her calmly.