"I don't see any repentance in you; and I want to know right now what you've done with that woman?"
Jack blinked, then smiled and gave a laugh expressive of disdain and contempt.
"If you please, which woman?"
William's frown deepened. The one woman was certainly enough, and his rage was increased by the leer that accompanied the question.
"Oh, I dare say there have been enough of them! I mean the one you took away from here; I mean Lois Kirkwood."
"Oh, Lois!" He spoke as though surprised that she should be chosen for particular attention, and his lip curled scornfully. "When a man goes wrong, Will, he pays for it. Take it from me that that's one gospel truth that I've proved to my entire satisfaction. It's queer, Will, how soon a bonfire burns out—the bigger the fire the quicker it goes. I went plum crazy about that girl. She'd married the one particular man on earth who was least likely to make her happy. He bored her. And I guess her baby bored her, too,—she wasn't a domestic animal,—no pussy cat to sit by the fire and play with the baby and have hubby's slippers toasting when he came home to supper. And I had time to play with her; I wasn't so intellectual as Tom, but my nature was a damned sight more sympathetic. It looked as though we had been made for each other, and I was fooled into thinking so. And I was bored myself—this silly little town, with nothing to hold anybody. Lois and I were made for a bigger world—at least we thought so: and by Jove, it was funny how we fooled each other—it was altogether too damned funny!"
"I'm glad you take a humorous view of it," replied William coldly. "Not satisfied with disgracing the family, you come back to rub it in. Where did you leave the woman? I suppose you've chucked her—the usual way."
Jack threw back his head and laughed.
"Well, I like that! You don't know what I had to put up with! She made me suffer, I can tell you! I don't believe she'd deny herself that she made it damned uncomfortable for me. She liked to spend money, for one thing, and I couldn't make it fast enough; and she wanted to mingle with the rich and gay, and our story had followed us, and it's funny, Will, what a lot of old-fashioned, stupid, Thursday-night-prayer-meeting and the-pastor-in-to-tea morality there is left in this fool world! It cut Lois up a good deal, being snubbed by people she wanted to stand well with. It gave me a jolt to find that I wasn't all-sufficient for her after all; which hurt some when we'd decided we could be happy alone together in the woods for the rest of our days. It's a long story, and I'm not going to talk about it. With the money I took away from here I began monkeying with real estate; it didn't seem that anybody out there could lose just then: but I was a bad guesser. In five years I had played in all my chips, and had to sneak around office buildings trying to sell life insurance, which wasn't dignified nor becoming in a member of the haughty house of Holton."
"Sam told me a different story. Why don't you tell the truth if you talk about it at all? You gambled and lost your money—that's what happened; and real estate speculation was only a side line. But Lois had money; I suppose you played that away, too. Sam never seemed quite clear about your relations with her."