“This election business is only a side-line of mine,” he replied. “I enjoy it. There’s nothing like knowing you can make a lot of so-called men roll over and play dead. If a man wants to find out where he stands, let him get out and try to make a crowd do something. Let him try to pull any prunes-and-prism stuff, either with his pocketbook or his opinions, and see where he gets off at. No, Sylvia, you played the wrong card. Eleven months out of the year I work like a nigger, and if you don’t know it, you’d better not say anything more about it.”
He clasped his hands about his knee and regarded her darkly, yet with a kind of joyousness. There was no end of admiration in his glance, but of kindness there was never a suggestion.
She gathered new energy from that look in his eyes. After all, they had been arguing about things which did not matter now. “Fectnor,” she said, “I’m sure there must be a good deal of justice in what you say. But I know you’re forgetting that when the man and the woman are through with youth there is a reckoning which gives the man all the best of it. His wrong-doing isn’t stamped upon him. He is respected. He may be poor, but he isn’t shunned.”
“That’s more of the same lie. Did you ever see a poor man—a really poor man—who was respected? There may be two or three of the people who know him best who will give him credit for certain things—if he denies himself to pay a debt, or forfeits his rest to sit up with a sick neighbor. But take the world as a whole, doesn’t it ride over the man who’s got nothing? Isn’t he dreaded like a plague? Isn’t he a kill-joy? I don’t care what a woman’s been, she’s as well off. A few people will give her credit for the good she does, and that’s all a man can hope for, if he’s been generous enough or enough alive to let his money go. No, you can’t build up any fences, Sylvia. We’re all in the same herd.”
She felt oppressed by the hardness, the relentlessness, of his words, his manner. She could not respond to him. But she knew that everything this man said, and everything he was, left out of the account all those qualities which make for hope and aspirations and faith.
Her glance, resting upon him as from a great distance, seemed to irritate him. “After all, Sylvia,” he said, “you’re putting on an awful lot of silk that don’t belong to you. Suppose we say that you’d have kept away from me if you hadn’t been too much influenced. There are other things to be remembered. Peterson, for example. Remember Peterson? I watched you and him together a good bit. You’ll never tell me you wasn’t loose with him.”
Much of her strength and pride returned to her at this. Whatever the truth was, she knew that Fectnor had no right to bring such a charge against her. “Your language is very quaint at times,” she said. A curve of disdain hovered about her lips. “I’m not aware of being, or of ever having been, loose in any way. I can’t think where such a word originated.”
“You know what I mean well enough. And some of those young fellows—the soldiers and railroaders—I don’t suppose any of them have got anything on you, either?”
“They haven’t, Fectnor!” she exclaimed hotly. She resolved to have nothing more to say to him. She felt that his brutality gave her the right to have done with him. And then her glance was arrested by his powerful hand, where it lay on the table beside him. It was blunt-fingered and broad and red, with the back covered by yellow hairs which extended down to the dabs of finger-nails.
He seemed to read her mind, and in answer he took up a heavy pewter cup and held it toward her. For an instant he permitted her to scrutinize the cup, and then his fingers closed. He opened his hand and the shapeless mass of pewter fell to the floor. He threw his head back with the ecstasy of perfect physical fitness. His laughter arose, almost hysterically.