“You're too tender-hearted, Mary.”
“No, 'tis not that! Should I go off and leave me own brother and sister, that need me?”
“But you could earn money and send it to them.”
“I earn a little here—I do cleanin' and nursin' for some that need me.”
“But outside—couldn't you earn more?”
“I could get a job in a restaurant for seven or eight a week, but I'd have to spend more, and what I sent home would not go so far, with me away. Or I could get a job in some other woman's home, and work fourteen hours a day for it. But, Joe, 'tis not more drudgery I want, 'tis somethin' fair to look upon—somethin' of my own!” She flung out her arms suddenly like one being stifled. “Oh, I want somethin' that's fair and clean!”
Again he felt her trembling. Again the path was rough, and having an impulse of sympathy, he put his arm about her. In the world of leisure, one might indulge in such considerateness, and he assumed it would not be different with a miner's daughter. But then, when she was close to him, he felt, rather than heard, a sob.
“Mary!” he whispered; and they stopped. Almost without realising it, he put his other arm about her, and in a moment more he felt her warm breath on his cheek, and she was trembling and shaking in his embrace. “Joe! Joe!” she whispered. “You take me away!”
She was a rose in a mining-camp, and Hal was deeply moved. The primrose path of dalliance stretched fair before him, here in the soft summer night, with a moon overhead which bore the same message as it bore in the Italian gardens of the leisure-class. But not many minutes passed before a cold fear began to steal over Hal. There was a girl at home, waiting for him; and also there was the resolve which had been growing in him since his coming to this place—a resolve to find some way of compensation to the poor, to repay them for the freedom and culture he had taken; not to prey upon them, upon any individual among them. There were the Jeff Cottons for that!
“Mary,” he pleaded, “we mustn't do this.”