“Poor Abbie!”
Thought, like lightning, breaks through the air in a quick slash from cloud to ground. Mamise’s whole thought was 213 from zig to zag in some such procedure as this, but infinitely swift.
“We––they? That means that Jake considers himself a part of the German organization for destruction, the will to ruin. That means that Jake must have been involved in the wreck of the Clara. That means that he deliberately connived at a crime against his country. That means that he is a traitor as well as a murderer. That means that my sister is the wife of a fiend. Poor Abbie!”
This thought stunned and blinded Mamise a long moment. She heard Jake grumbling:
“What ya mean––‘poor Abbie!’?”
Mamise was afraid to say. She cast one glance at Jake, and the lightning of understanding struck him. He realized what she was thinking––or at least he suspected it, because he was thinking of his own past. He was realizing that he had met Nicky Easton through Mamise, though Mamise did not know this––that is, he hoped she did not. And yet perhaps she did.
And now Mamise and Jake were mutually afraid of each other. Abbie was altogether in the dark, and a little jealous of Mamise and her peculiar secrets, but her general mood was one of stolid thoughtlessness.
Jake, suspecting Mamise’s suspicion of him, was moved to justify himself by one of his tirades against society in general. Abbie, who had about as much confidence in the world as an old rabbit in a doggy country, had heard Jake thunder so often that his denunciations had become as vaguely lulling as a continual surf. Generalizations meant nothing to her bovine soul. She was thinking of something else, usually, throughout all the fiery Jakiads. While he indicted whole nations and denounced all success as a crime against unsuccess she was hunting through her work-basket for a good thread to patch Sam’s pants with.
Abbie was unmoved, but Mamise was appalled. It was her first encounter with the abysmal hatred of which some of these loud lovers of mankind are capable. Jake’s theories had been merely absurd or annoying before, but now they grew monstrous, for they seemed to be confirmed by an actual crime.
Mamise felt that she must escape from the presence of 214 Jake or attack him. She despised him too well to argue with him, and she rose to go.