"It don't matter, Miss Lennox," she said, and she said it so calmly and so coldly that Marian involuntarily drew back in her chair. "I just wondered, that was all."
She stopped an instant. Her hostess tried to speak and could not, but presently the girl pursued:
"I wasn't square with you, that night you gave me the recommedation to Mrs. Turner, Miss Lennox. I suppose I ought to've told you all about myself, but I had to get work, an' I knew if I told you I wouldn't get no job. I'd been—I'd been in a house. I wanted to get away, an' a man had just got me out a little more'n a month or so before."
"It was not exactly honest of you," said Marian.
She was sorry as soon as she had spoken, but Mary, showing no sign of hurt or resentment, was continuing before reparation or explanation could be made.
Very simply she told the hard outward facts of her story. She did not give the history of her capture, because her experience with Mrs. Turner, with the homely little woman that had called at the employment-agency, and with Philip Beekman had shown her that this could not lessen the extent of her contamination. Honestly rejecting her deception of Marian, goaded by that glimpse of Wesley Dyker into an impulse to make, at any cost to herself, the amend of truth for what fault she had committed, she was still more powerfully moved by a determination to accept without reservation the part that the world had now assigned her, and to fight under no colors save her own.
Marian, her fine face drawn with pain, heard the narrative in a silence broken only when Mary had concluded with her departure from the hospital. The girl had mentioned no names.
"And even this one man," murmured Marian at last, "even this man who had the courage to rescue you—even he was a visitor at such a place?"
"Why, of course," said Mary, as yet unused to the idea of any blame attaching to the mere male patronage of slavery. "How else could I have got him for help?"
"But you said he was in love with that woman who conducted the—house."