"No. You tell him about it, James. You have seen her and talked with her. They were quarrelling about her, as I understand, and she thinks because she was the cause of the deed she must help him make retribution. Isn't that it, James? She knows perfectly well what it means for her, for she has had her aspirations. I can see it all. Frale says he was not drunk nor his friend either. He says the other man claimed—but I won't go into that—only Cassandra promised him before God, he says, that if he would repent, she would marry him. And when she was here she used to talk about the way those women live. How her own mother has worked and aged! Why, she is not yet sixty. You have seen how they live in their wretched little cabins, Doctor; that's what Frale would doom her to. He never in life will understand her. He'll grow old like his father,—a passionate, ignorant, untamed animal, and worse, for he would be drunken as well. He's been drunk twice since he came down here. James, you know they think it's perfectly right to get drunk Saturday afternoon."
"Yes, it seems a terrible waste; but if she has children, she will be able to do more for them than her mother has done for her, and they will have her inheritance; so her life can't be wholly wasted, even if she is not able to live up to her aspirations."
"James Towers! I—that—it's because you are a man that you can talk so! I'm ashamed, and you a bishop! I wish—" Betty's eyes were full of angry tears. "I only wish you were a woman. Slowly improve the race by bearing children—giving them her inheritance! How would she bear them? Year after year—ill fed, half clothed, slaving to raise enough to hold their souls in their bodies, bringing them into the world for a brute who knows only enough to make corn whiskey—to sell it—and drink it—and reproduce his kind—when—when she knows all the time what ought to be! Oh, James, James, think of it!"
"My dear, my dear, you forget, he has promised to repent and live a different life. If he does, things will be better than we now see them. If he does not change, then we may interfere—perhaps."
"I know, James. But—but—suppose he repents and she becomes his wife, and puts aside all her natural tastes, and the studies she loves, and goes on living with him there on the home place, and he does the best he can—even. Don't you see that her nature is fine and—and so different—even at the best, James, for her it will be death in life. And then there is the terrible chance, after all, that he might go back and be like his father before him, and then what?"
"Well, their lives and destinies are not in our hands; we can only watch out for them and help them."
"James, he has been drunk twice!"
"Yes, yes, Betty, my little tempest, and if he gets drunk twice more, and twice more, she will still forgive him until seventy times seven. We must make her see that unless he keeps his promise to her, she must give him up."
"Of course. I suppose that's all we can do. I—don't know what you'll think of me, Doctor Thryng; I'm a dreadful scold. If James were not an angel—"