He began where all good stories should begin, at the beginning. He did not boast and he did not depreciate. He took no undue credit for himself and he made no maudlin, insipid bid for compassion. He did not spare himself and he did not spare others. He hewed a straight, simple, naked narrative of fact and experience—and let the chips of blame or censure clutter where and whom they would.
The green billets burned lazily in the little stove. The smoke from Nathan’s briar curled upward and after shaping into sweeter pictures of the future than it could ever make of the past, it wafted out a slightly lowered window at the back.
And Madelaine listened. She was one of those big women whose ability to listen is part of her birthright—her maternal heritage. When Nathan spoke frankly and fearlessly of his experience with Carol, and why the Gardner girl had returned to Ohio, she interrupted for the first time.
“But couldn’t she see it was because of your great, clean love for her that you couldn’t soil that love with anything sordid? Wasn’t she big enough to realize you didn’t want your idol to have feet of clay of your own modeling?”
Nathan sighed and shrugged his shoulders. He made no comment.
Then he told of his life with Milly, the cheapness, the shallowness, the depression and handicap of it. He told of the petty bickerings and the reasons for them; the hideous, mediocre, unsatisfying slovenliness of her home while he hungered bitterly for beautiful things without knowing how to satisfy that hunger. He told the incident of the repainted Victrola as an illustration of six discouraging years. He could afford to laugh at it now. He did laugh. But Madelaine did not laugh. She was very close to tears.
When he came to the incident where old Caleb had brought the pink rosebuds to the child’s funeral and then read Nathan the Twenty-third Psalm in the hotel afterward, Madelaine laughed, strange as the statement may sound. But it was not in mirth. It was to counteract the tears which had brimmed over. She smeared them away with her naked fingers, not bothering to draw out her handkerchief.
Nathan told of his business struggle with his father; the neurotic extravagances of his mother; the death of Milly after her liaison with Plumb. Then he came to that night in Chicago when he had visited Bernie and had acid poured on his quivering flesh because of his infirmities. Madelaine paled a moment. Then righteous anger flooded her face.
“And Bernie said any such thing? Acted in any such way? Twitted you for things you could not help? I’d like to pull her ears!”
No woman had ever declared before that she would like to pull any one’s ears in Nathan’s behalf. It was a new experience for the lonely man and it overwhelmed him. Especially when Madelaine went on: