"I suppose I'm foolish," she began haltingly. "But I had been expecting—all of us had—that when you came home from—from Denver—the first time, I mean—you would be the old Dave Sanders we all knew and liked. We wanted our friendship to—to help make up to you for what you must have suffered. We didn't think you'd hold us off like this."
His eyes narrowed. He looked away at the cedars on the hills painted in lustrous blues and greens and purples, and at the slopes below burnt to exquisite color lights by the fires of fall. But what he saw was a gray prison wall with armed men in the towers.
"If I could tell you!" He said it in a whisper, to himself, but she just caught the words.
"Won't you try?" she said, ever so gently.
He could not sully her innocence by telling of the furtive whisperings that had fouled the prison life, made of it an experience degrading and corrosive. He told her, instead, of the externals of that existence, of how he had risen, dressed, eaten, worked, exercised, and slept under orders. He described to her the cells, four by seven by seven, barred, built in tiers, faced by narrow iron balconies, each containing a stool, a chair, a shelf, a bunk. In his effort to show her the chasm that separated him from her he did not spare himself at all. Dryly and in clean-cut strokes he showed her the sordidness of which he had been the victim and left her to judge for herself of its evil effect on his character.
When he had finished he knew that he had failed. She wept for pity and murmured, "You poor boy…. You poor boy!"
He tried again, and this time he drew the moral. "Don't you see, I'm a marked man—marked for life." He hesitated, then pushed on. "You're fine and clean and generous—what a good father and mother, and all this have made you." He swept his hand round in a wide gesture to include the sun and the hills and all the brave life of the open. "If I come too near you, don't you see I taint you? I'm a man who was shut up because—"
"Fiddlesticks! You're a man who has been done a wrong. You mustn't grow morbid over it. After all, you've been found innocent."
"That isn't what counts. I've been in the penitentiary. Nothing can wipe that out. The stain of it's on me and can't be washed away."
She turned on him with a little burst of feminine ferocity. "How dare you talk that way, Dave Sanders! I want to be proud of you. We all do. But how can we be if you give up like a quitter? Don't we all have to keep beginning our lives over and over again? Aren't we all forever getting into trouble and getting out of it? A man is as good as he makes himself. It doesn't matter what outside thing has happened to him. Do you dare tell me that my dad wouldn't be worth loving if he'd been in prison forty times?"