“What do you think of me? What do you think of me?” he muttered, stupidly.
She shrugged lightly. “It don’t make any difference what I think of you,” she said. “Ain’t it whether I’m goin’ to get away from Inch or not? Ain’t that the idea?”
When he came to think of it, that was the immediate concern. With his first utterance he had blundered, as he had blundered since the moment when she had put herself in his keeping. None the less his misery was too sharp to dismiss. But he had no clear idea how to ask a woman’s forgiveness—a thing that he had never done in his life.
“I feel as bad as hell,” he blurted out.
“What for?” she asked.
“For all I’ve done,” he put it.
She considered this.
“Look here,” she said slowly. “You’ve been drunk before often enough, ain’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered, miserably.