“What you mean is—you haven’t any place for me as a lover or a husband.”
“That’s like you, but that’s it.... Dicky, you mean to me something done, something found. I don’t dare to turn to you and rest. The savage undone things in me won’t rest! They demand experiences, life—and no one knows better, that they mean pain ... and oh—under your lamp—it’s horrible to tell it, but you’ll forgive me later, when you see that it had to be told——”
“What are you talking about, Pidge?”
“Under your lamp—in there! He came about a manuscript. He was broke and needed help—all his stories refused. He asked to see me that night. Miss Claes’ basement was occupied. She sent him up. We talked. He wanted something, money, everything. Under your light—he took me to him, his coat open——”
Cobden startled her, as he cleared his throat. The silence between them had been so deep.
“It meant nothing to him! He was used to it. It was only his way to get something—money most, he wanted. It was just as he might take a waitress or hall maid—used to having girls ‘fall for’ him. This is what I mean—though I understand him, a theatrical mind, a liar—life meant something to me that instant, that it never meant before. Something I must do, something calling—pain, but something I haven’t done!”
“You mean—you mean—it isn’t over?”
“Just that, Dicky, and oh, forgive me! I may not see him ever again, but something in me isn’t ‘over.’ I had to tell you—to be honest, to learn to be honest. You’ll be glad some day!”
XVI
DICKY FEELS A SLUMP
IT was nearly a week afterward when Pidge heard sounds, not of meeting only, but of mauling, from over the partitions of Richard Cobden’s office at The Public Square. Her desk was now in John Higgins’ room. The racket was “young”—something of the sort you expect in a college fraternity house, rather than in the editorial rooms of a magazine of dignified social protest and short story ideals. John Higgins winced and glared. Now the stranger’s voice was upraised: