THE Worm sat on a wooden chair, an expression of puzzled gravity on his usually whimsical face. The room was a small kitchen. The two screened windows gave a view of a suburban yard, bounded by an alley and beyond the alley other yards; beyond these a row of small frame houses. There were trees; and the scent of a honeysuckle vine.
Sue Wilde, her slim person enveloped in a checked apron, knelt by the old-fashioned coal range. The lower door was open, the ash-pan drawn half out. There were ashes on the floor about her knees.
Henry Bates absently drew out his old caked brier pipe; filled and lighted it. Meditatively he studied the girl—her apron, the flush on her face, the fascinating lights in her tousled hair—telling himself that the scene was real, that the young rebel soul he had known in the Village was this same Sue Wilde. The scent of the honeysuckle floated thickly to his nostrils. He stared out at the row of little wooden houses. He slowly shook his head; and his teeth closed hard on the pipe stem.
“Henry,” she cried softly, throwing out her fine hands, “don't you understand! I had a conscience all the time. That's what was the matter!”
“I think I understand well enough, Sue,” said he. “It's the”—he looked again about the kitchen and out the window—“it's the setting! I hadn't pictured you as swinging so far to this extreme Though, as you know, there in the Village, I have been rather conservative in my feelings about you.”
“I know, Henry.” She settled back on her heels. He saw how subdued she was. The tears were not far from her eyes. “I've been all wrong.”
“Wrong, Sue?”
“Absolutely. In all I said and tried to do in the Village.” He was shaking his head; but she continued: “I was cutting at the roots of my own life. I disowned every spiritual obligation. I put my faith in Nietzsche and the Russian crowd, in egotism. Henry”'—her eyes unmistakably filled now'; her voice grew unsteady—“once my father came over into the Village after me. He tried to get me to come home. I was playing at the Crossroads then.”
“Yes,” said he shortly, “I remember that time.”
“I had on my boy costume. He came straight to the theater and I had to go out front and talk with him. We quarreled—”