"What do you mean, Snyder?"
"I mean, you shan't do what I did!" said the woman, clutching her arm—"what I did blindly!"
"You weren't—"
"Married? Never! You didn't know it? I thought you guessed. The others did!"
"No, no! I thought, at times—but I didn't know!"
"Do you know where I had my child?" she said, folding her arms across her heart and flinging back her head as if to breast a storm. "I, nineteen years old, a girl? In a charity hospital, between a black woman and a raging shrieking dago with the fear of death in her! The story? Hell! Any one's story! What does that matter? Anyhow, I believed! I had ideas, like you: liberty, woman same as man. That suited him! It suits them all! What do they risk? Honey, if I told you what I went through those last months, you'd never look at a man again! You think I'm bitter, hard? Yes, I am hard, through and through! And I believed in him. And proud? God! how proud I was!"
"Snyder! Snyder!" She put out her hands as if to ward off the picture that rose luridly to her eyes.
"You don't know—no woman knows what the hell of suffering is," she continued doggedly, "until they're caught, until they've got to bring into the world another soul, and you stand branded, with every tongue against you! God! What a world! You marry—you're safe! You can be a fiend incarnate, lower than the gutter. Nothing to say! But the other? To be a girl, to believe, to love, to bear a child, as God intended you to, in love—every one against you, your own family cursin' you, closing the doors on you, telling you to go and starve! Don't talk to me! I know! Marry, honey, marry! You've got to, in this world!"
She was weeping now, and the sight of these unwonted tears on the iron countenance of Snyder terrified Dodo more than all she had heard. She felt now very little, very weak, far from the volatile Dodo of dreams and fantasies.
"Oh, Snyder!" she cried brokenly, "why didn't you tell me before? I've misjudged you so!"