“I saw the audience, Glory; that was enough for me. It is impossible for a girl to live long in an atmosphere like that and be a good woman. Yes, my child, impossible' God forbid that I should sit in judgment on any man, still less on any woman!—but the women of the music hall, do they remain good women? Poor souls, they are placed in a position so false that it would require extraordinary virtue not to become false along with it! And the whiter the soul that is dragged through that—that mire, the more the defilement. The audiences at such places don't want the white soul, they don't want the good woman, they want the woman who has tasted of the tree of good and evil. You can see it in their faces, and hear it in their laughter, and measure it in their applause. Oh, I'm only a priest, but I've seen these places all the world over, and I know what I'm saying, and I know it's true and you know it's true, Glory——”
Glory leaped up from the table and her eyes seemed to emit fire. “I know it's hard and cruel and pitiless, and, since you were there on Monday and saw how kind the audience was to me, it's personal and untrue as well.”
But her voice broke and she sat down again and said in another tone: “But, John, it's nearly a year, you know, since we saw each other last, and isn't it a pity? Tell me, where are you living now? Have you made your plans for the future? Oh, who do you think was with me just before you called yesterday? Polly—Polly Love, you remember! She's grown stout and plainer, poor thing, and I was so sorry——Her brother was in your Brotherhood, wasn't he? Is he as strangely fond of her as ever? Is he? Eh? Don't you understand? Polly's brother, I mean?”
“He's dead, Glory. Yes, dead. He died a month ago. Poor boy, he died broken-hearted! He had come to hear of his sister's trouble at the hospital. I was to blame for that. He never looked up again.”
There was silence; both were gazing into the fire, and Glory's mouth was quivering. All at once she said: “John—John Storm, why can't you understand that it's not the same with me as with other women? There seem to be two women in me always. After I left the hospital I went through a good deal. Nobody will ever know how much I went through. But even at the worst, somehow I seemed to enjoy and rejoice in everything. Things happened that made me cry, but there was another me that was laughing. And that's how it is with the life I am living now. It is not I myself that go through this—this mire, as you call it, it's only my other self, my lower self, if you like, but I am not touched by it at all. Don't you see that? Don't you, now?”
“There are professions which are a source of temptation, and talents that are a snare, Glory——”
“I see, I see what you mean. There are not many ways a woman can succeed in—that's the cruelty of things. But there are a few, and I've chosen the one I'm fit for. And now, now that I've escaped from all that misery, that meanness, and have brought the eyes of London upon me, and the world is full of smiles for me, and sunshine, and I am happy, you come at last, you that I couldn't find when I wanted you so much—oh, so much!—because you had forgotten me; you come to me out of a darkness like the grave and tell me to give it all up. Yes, yes, yes, that's what you mean—give it all up! Oh, it's cruel!”
She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. He bent over her with a sorrowful face and said, “My child, if I have come out of a darkness as of the grave it is because I had not forgotten you there, but was thinking of you every day and hour.”
Her sobbing ceased, but the tears still flowed through her fingers.
“Before that poor lad abandoned hope he came out into the world too-stole out-thinking to find his lost one. I told him to look for you first, and he went to the hospital.”