This was probably accurate enough as a summary, but it did not explain why to Betty. She dismissed the subject for the moment, because Ruth came into the room followed by Bridget.
The child was in her nightgown and had come to kiss them before going to bed. She ran to her father, threw her arms around his neck, and gave him a great bear hug. Long since she had forgotten his harshness of the morning.
But he had neither forgotten nor forgiven himself. In the first place, he had been unjust. The injunction against going to the barn had not been a blanket one. It had applied only to that part of the building where the blooded stallion was kept in a box stall. He had hurt her feelings as a vent to his annoyance at what had taken place by the creek a half-hour earlier. It was pretty small business, he admitted, to take out his self-disgust on an innocent four-year-old.
He held Ruth close in his arms while Bridget waited smilingly and the little one confided to him plans about the puppies.
“’N’ I’m gonna have Lon make me a wagon, ’n’ I’ll drive it jus’ like Betty does the team, ’n’ I fink I’ll call the puppies Prince ’n’ Rover ’n’ Baby Fifi ’n’—’n’ everyfing,” she concluded all in a breath.
“That’ll be bully,” the father agreed, stroking the soft flaxen curls fondly. He wondered reproachfully why it was that he could turn on those he loved, as he had done on the child this morning. He had never done it before with Ruth, and he resolved he never would again.
Ruth kissed Betty good-night and went out of the room in the arms of Bridget, held close to her ample bosom, kicking and squealing with delight because she was being tickled in the ribs.
As soon as Betty was in her own room, alone with her thoughts and the rest of the world shut out, her mind went back to the problem of the boy who had so early made such shipwreck of his life. She puzzled over this while she was preparing for bed and afterward while she lay between the white sheets, barred squares from the window frames checkering the moonlight on the linen. What in the world could cause a man, educated, clean-fibered, strong, to let go of life like that?
It could not be a woman. In spite of her youth, she knew this by instinct. A game man did not give up because of blows dealt to him from the outside. The surrender had to come from within. No wounds at the hands of another can subdue the indomitable soul. Young though she was, she knew that. Books of fiction might say the contrary, but she had a sure conviction they were wrong. What was it Browning said?—“...Incentives come from the soul’s self.” Well, the converse of it must also be true.
Somewhere in this boy—she persisted in thinking of him as a boy, perhaps because his great need so filled her with the desire to help him—there must be a weak strain. It was not, could not be, a vile one. She held to that steadily and surely, without any of the passionate insistence that doubt engenders. Ragged and dusty though he was physically, on the drift to destruction, cynically self-condemned, he was yet essentially clean and fine, a strain of the thoroughbred in him. That was her judgment, and she was prepared to wager all she had on the truth of it.