Confession, the details, the whole story, appealed to her evidently as obvious, typical, useless. She tried to select simple words, to leave the facts undimmed by passionate speech.
"As I told you, an old friend of my father's helped me to get work. That kept me from ending it just there. As the months went on and he did not try to find me, I got used to the round, to the school, the living on, dead and alive. I thought of getting a divorce, of finding some country school in another state. Dr. Leonard urged me to. I might have—I don't know. But accidentally he was brought back. I was going home from a teachers' meeting that night. I saw him lying on the pavement, thrown out of the saloon, as he told you. A crowd gathered. He was unconscious. I wanted to run away, to leave him, to escape. He groaned. I couldn't—I couldn't."
She sighed wearily at the memory of her illogical act. The doctor nodded sympathetically. It was a fatal moment, the point of decision in her life. He understood what it meant to her.
"There was no one else to take him—to be responsible. He had been mine. After all, the divorce would have made no difference; it never can. You have to take your failures; you have to endure."
"Has he any relatives?" Sommers asked.
"A few; they were done with him long ago. They had money, and they wanted to get rid of him. They put him into a business that would keep him away from them; that would give him the best chance to kill himself—going about everywhere, always travelling, always with men who drink and live in hotels as he has. They shoved him into the world to let the world, or any one who would, take care of him."
It had been her lot, because of the error of her incompetent heart, to take charge of this flotsam. That was so evident that she had given up seeking for escape.
"He is helpless now," she added, as for excuse. "It would be cruel."
For a moment the doctor's face looked hard. Was it, he seemed to be turning over in his mind, that she loved him a little in the depths of her heart? That was an irritating trait of feminine stupidity. But one intelligent glance at her calm face rendered that supposition impossible. She was merely largely human, with a sense of remote claims.
"And now what will you do?" he asked.