Adelle had no reply to this blunt logic. Marriage, he seemed to think, was one of the privileges of the rich class, which she was sure ought not to be so.
"The trouble with the workingman, ma'am, is that he has done that too long,—got families that had to live the best they could, any old way, and take any old job they could get. That's what's made it easy goin' for you! But the workingman is learnin' a thing or two. Men like me won't get married, nor have children to slave for the rich."
"What do the girls do?" Adelle asked, thinking of her own fate if she had been left in the Church Street rooming-house.
The mason shrugged his shoulders and came out with another brutality.
"Some of 'em go into the houses for your men to use—there's always that for 'em," he added, with a disagreeable laugh. "No, ma'am, I tell you until things are made more right in this world, it's better for a poor man to get along the best he can without draggin' a woman after him and a lot of helpless children."
"I didn't know it was as bad as that," Adelle remarked helplessly.
"I guess, ma'am, there are a good many things about life you don't know."
"That's so," Adelle admitted honestly.
"But I know!" the mason exclaimed with rising excitement. "I've seen it over and over, everywhere. I've seen it in my own family," he said in a burst of bitter confidence. "There were eight of us and we were only middling poor until father died. The old man was a carpenter, up north in Sacramento County. He had a small place outside of town and we raised some stuff. But he got sick and died, when he weren't forty, and mother had the whole eight of us on her hands. I was just twelve and my oldest brother fifteen,—he was the only one could earn a dollar. We got on somehow, those that lived. Two of my sisters are married to farmers and there's another—well, she's the other thing." He stopped to look belligerently at Adelle as if she had somehow to do with it. "She was married to a workingman, good enough, I guess, but he got out of work and heard of something up north and never came back.... We boys scattered around where we could get work. Two of us is married and got families. Guess they wish often enough they hadn't, too!"
Adelle was absorbed by the mason's personal statement. She had forgotten by this time her first self-consciousness in talking to the discharged workman, and he, too, seemed less truculent, as if he enjoyed letting off steam and stating his point of view to his ex-employer.