“Well, there’s one thing damn sure, I’ll not live with you any more–no man would respect me if I did after to-night.”
“And no man,” she smiled and said in her mocking voice, “will respect you if you leave me. How Laura’s friends will laugh when you go, and say that Tom Van Dorn simply can’t live with any one. How the Nesbit crowd will titter when you leave me, and say Tom Van Dorn got just what he had coming! Why–go on–leave me–if you dare! You know you don’t dare to. It’s for better or worse, Tom, until death do us part–dawling!”
She laughed and winked indecently at him.
“I will leave you, I tell you, I will leave you,” he burst forth, half rising. “All the devils of hell can’t keep me here.”
“Except just this one,” she mocked. “Oh, you might leave me and go with your present mistress! By the way, who is our latest conquest–dawling? I’m sure that would be fine. Wouldn’t they cackle–the dear old hens whose claws scratch your heart so every day?” She leaned over, caressing him devilishly, and cried, “For you know when you get loose from me, you’ll pretty nearly have to marry the other 429lady–wouldn’t that be nice? ‘Through sickness and health, for good or for ill,’–isn’t it nice?” she scoffed. Then she turned on him savagely, “So you will try to hide behind a child, and use him for a shield–Oh, you cur–you despicable dog,” she scorned. Then she drew herself up and spoke in a passion that all but hissed at him. “I tell you, Tom Van Dorn, if you ever, in this row that’s coming, harm a hair of that boy’s head–you’ll carry the scar of that hair to your grave. I mean it.”
Van Dorn sprang up. He cried: “What business is it of yours? You she devil, what’s the boy to you? Can’t I run my own business? Why do you care so much for the Adams brat? Answer me, I tell you–answer me,” he cried, his wrath filling his voice.
“Oh, nothing, dawling,” she made a wicked, obscene eye at him, and simpered: “Oh, nothing, Tom–only you see I might be his mother!”
She played with the vulgar diamonds that hid her fingers and looked down coyly as she smiled into his gray face.
“Great God,” he whispered, “were you born a–” he stopped, ashamed of the word in his mouth.
The woman kept twinkling her indecent eyes at him and put her head on one side as she replied: “Whatever I am, I’m the wife of Judge Van Dorn; so I’m quite respectable now–whatever I was once. Isn’t that lawvly, dawling!” She began talking in her baby manner.