“I been lovin’ Mil ever since you married her.” The steam-fitter confessed it sheepishly, picking at his broken finger nails. “I was lovin’ of her when you stepped in to the shop and cut me out. If you’re goin’ to blame anybody, blame yourself!”
“I am blaming myself,” Nathan returned quietly. “All I can’t understand is, Milly—how could you do it?”
“Do what?” snapped the girl.
“All the time I was trying to do things for you—get you this home—furnish it as you wanted—buy you clothes—take you with me on my trips—introduce you to people in New York—hand you out more money than you’d ever be able to earn yourself—and all the time you loved another man behind my back! You were carrying on with him while I had the utmost confidence in you—at least, I refused to believe what all the town tried to tell me.”
Milly began to cry.
“It was little Mary,” she sobbed. “You was her father. Besides, you’d never understand how or why I loved Si. I didn’t suppose you ever could.”
“I should think you’d have felt like a virago,” declared Nathan disgustedly. “What else can you call yourself?” He looked down upon her as upon some biological specimen that was exhibiting strange phenomena.
“I don’t know what it means, but I can guess—and if I’m that for lovin’ Si more’n you—well, I ain’t ashamed of it! It’s bein’ done every day! You could go see a few classy films if you wasn’t so high-brow——!”
“That’s plenty, Milly. You love Plumb enough to follow him into disgrace. Is that it?”
“With my kind of love there ain’t no disgrace. In ‘Sex and the High Heart’ it showed where——”