"You mean yourself," he said. "Jolly lot you think of me and my children if you ask me to take her back. Not me! I'll be damned first."
"You married her, Randall, against the wishes of your family; and you're responsible to your family for the way she conducts herself."
"I should rather think I was responsible! If I wasn't—if I was a bletherin' idiot—I might take her back—"
"I don't say if she leaves you again you'll take her back a second time. But you got to give her a chance. After all, she's the mother of your children. You married her."
"Yes. That's where I went wrong. That's what made her do it, if you want to know. That's the provocation I gave her. It's what she always had against me—the children, and my marrying her. And she was right. She never ought to have had children. I never ought to have married her—against her will."
"Well, I can't think what you did it for—in such haste."
"I did it," said Ranny, in his maturity, his lucidity, "because it was the way I was brought up. I suppose, come to that, I did it for all you."
He saw everything now as it was.
"How d'you make that out? Did it for us!"
Then Ranny delivered his soul, and the escape, the outburst was tremendous, cataclysmic.