She stopped, and each was seized with the chill of this awful thought. He gave a deep sigh and put his arm around her. She crowded close to him, feeling so little, of such small consequence, staring out at the battling currents of brutal thoroughfares. The clamor of the city came roaring at their windows—immense glaring cars with strident bells, iron masses above shattering the air, even the earth below periodically shaken with the rumble of multitudes tearing through the bowels of the city. Confusion, riot multiplied, echoed and reechoed; masses of sky-cleaving prisons; millions of lights, blinding and bewildering; and everywhere the multitude, humanity in thousands on thousands, crowding their path, spying on every action, drowning out sigh and laughter! What peace or tranquillity was there? What fragile thing could endure against the buffeting? What mattered? By Massingale's side, shivering, clinging, she felt the weak tears suddenly rising, seized by a horror of this life which had to be lived, some way or other, in fear of what might follow.
"Be honest! Tell me all you've hidden! Let me know the truth, at least!" he said suddenly.
She sat up, drawing away from him, readjusting her hat. Yes, she would throw herself on his generosity; she would tell him the truth—perhaps not the truth in every detail, but all that was vital. For she could not bear that he should see Josh Nebbins as he really was. The vulgarity, the pettiness of it, she would keep from him, divining how his aristocratic temperament would revolt at the thought that such arms had once held her as his now encircled her.
"It is nothing bad!" she said. "There is nothing in my life that I am ashamed of. That is the truth! Only, I am upset, irritated, terribly irritated. I am passing through a most disagreeable experience. The man you saw I was engaged to three years ago, when I was an ignorant foolish girl. I regret it bitterly! We were totally unsuited. Now it is ridiculous, humiliating! I never expected to see him again!"
"Who is he?" he asked.
"Oh, there is nothing wrong with him!" she said instantly. "He was in the ministry, in settlement work—very honest, very good. Then he went on a paper. I don't know how it happened! I was very religious then; I wanted to devote my life—"
"But why didn't you break it off, Dodo?"
"I did! But you don't know him! He wouldn't marry me then until he'd saved some money, writing articles and all that sort of thing. Now he can't see how I've changed, how impossible it would be. And oh, it makes me shudder! It's such a narrow walled-in little life! So barren, so ugly!"
"Send him away!"
"If I could! He won't understand. And when I'm with him I feel as if I were being dragged back to all I hate! He's a terrible man! Sometimes I really am afraid he'll force me to marry him. Oh, I assure you, I am very, very unhappy!"