She turned up the gas in a dingy parlour whose shabby upholstery retained the vague conglomerate odours of boiled vegetables. The place was hot and he threw open his coat but she did not ask him to sit down. She closed the door and stood beside it, as though to emphasize the brevity of the interview.
“I must tell you something—something you have a right to know. I ought to have told you at your house the other morning, but I could not do it then. It pleased me—I may as well tell you that; it can make no difference now—I was pleased that you wanted my friendship, that you asked me to help you. It flattered me, I suppose, but I knew at once that it was all wrong. I had known from the first time you spoke to me and even after we met again at the parish house, that we must not know each other. It was all wrong, very wrong. And to-day you heard what Joe said. He was delirious and didn’t even know who we were; but what he said about me had a meaning. We were born in the same town—up there at Denbeigh. His father and mine both worked in the anthracite mines; we went to school together; I went to the high school, but Joe had to stop and go to work. When I was eighteen we ran off and were married by a minister in Scranton. I think he really loved me and I was fond of him, but I had been better educated than Joe. He was a miner, but had quit that to play baseball. He was a good player, they said, and could make more money travelling about than by working in the mines. But it was a mistake, our marrying, and I saw at once that it wouldn’t do. After three months I wrote to him while he was away that I would not live with him—that it was all ended. My grandfather got a divorce for me—I know now that was wrong, too. Joe did nothing to prevent it; but after I came to Pittsburg last fall I began meeting him, and he would follow me sometimes. He had taken it hard, poor Joe! And I was anxious to go on with my studies—that was the real trouble; and Joe didn’t know or care about those things. He used to laugh at my pictures and say they were very pretty; but he was never unkind to me. He was a good boy—a clean, upright boy; and I brushed him out of my life as you would sweep dust out of a room. It was not right—it was not right—it was not right!”
She stood rigidly against the wall, her plain, long coat thrown open and disclosing her simplest and cheapest of gowns. When she had spoken to him in his father’s library of the nobility of labour it had been with an exultance that thrilled him; she had told him this pitiful little story in hurried whispers, dry-eyed but with uplifted head.
“I am glad you told me; but you are taking it hard now because Joe is so ill. You have no right to accuse yourself; you and Joe are wholly different; your marriage was a boy-and-girl affair and utterly unfit. The law has freed you, as it should free people who make such mistakes. You have the ambition and ability to do something in the world. Joe is a good boy but he could never tiptoe up to you. You did only the right thing,” Wayne ran on glibly. “Your life is your own to do with as you like: you would have no right to throw it away or waste it.”
The unreality of a situation in which he was weighing right and wrong for another was not lost on him; and he was fully conscious that his words made no impression on her. She was intent with her own thoughts and her eyes rested upon him unseeingly. She had hinted before at reasons why they should not know each other, but he had assumed that these were chiefly his own reputation and the divergent paths to which they were born. But he knew now that she was a divorced woman; she had been the wife of a coal miner, a ball player, his own servant. These facts swept in review before him and he met them with full gaze, giving full value to every point. She was young, and they exercised on each other an attraction with which it might be possible to trifle; and yet no evil thought came into his heart. She had opened the slender book of her life to its marred page; her life, like his, had failed at the start; but into this knowledge he read a new kinship between them.
He attempted to reason her out of her position and failed.
“It was wrong; it was a great sin,” she persisted.
Suddenly he stood at her side and seized her hands.
“Jean! Jean! You are a free woman. You mean all there is in the world to me of purity and goodness and sweetness. I need you! I need you! And I believe you need me. Let us begin our lives again, Jean. I will be so good to you; I will love you so much—so much.”
But she flung open the door behind her.