He laughed a little.
"Oh, my story is just every man's. I've mucked it a bit worse, that's all. But the fight's pretty well as hard with all of us. Directly we're grown up, almost before, there are people going about whose paid business it is to tempt us. Tempting us, just when Nature has made it most difficult for us to resist, is the profession of thousands of human beings. We fall—we often fall—for if we didn't a powerful set would have empty pockets—so they see that we fall. And then we can't pick ourselves up, we sink deeper and deeper into the mud ... and some of us touch bottom."
He paused, but she did not speak. Her face was turned away.
"The horrible thing I did," he continued almost roughly, "which, if you'd only believe me, I loathe as much as you do—I did only as the consequence of other things, not quite so bad, before it. If a woman like you had come along when I first fell—I was only nineteen—she might have pulled me up again. But she didn't come. Other women came, and they knocked me flatter. They couldn't forgive. Poor devils! I don't blame them—they'd a great deal to forgive. I went down—and down—till it became a sort of habit to lie there in the ditch. Then you came, and I—I wanted to get up."
She still looked away from him, but her head was bowed.
"Oh, Tony—won't you give me a hand?"
"How can I?"
"By just believing I can and will do better, and by saying that if I live a decent life, and pull my name out of the dirt, and make myself fit to know you, I may be your—friend. You've a right to punish me, but I ask you to put aside that right for—for pity's sake."
"I don't see why you want my forgiveness so much—why it means such a lot to you."
"It means the world to me. Oh, Tony—little pal that was—forgive me! Life's a hard, rotten, wretched thing, and if there was no one to forgive...."