“But—” she tried to say.
“You come along with me,” he repeated. And as her troubled look questioned him:
“I’ve got two tickets to Washington,” he said. “You don’t want no job here if you get one.”
“You hadn’t ought—” she began, breathlessly.
“I know it,” he told her. “What I’d ought to ’a’ done was to get two tickets to Whiteface and the hut. Hadn’t I?”
The baby, deserted, began to cry weakly. Lory turned back to her, stooped over her, comforted her. As he stood there, leaning in the doorway, once more there came to the Inger that curiously sharp sense of the morning on the prairie.
For a flash as he looked at those empty faces and worn figures, he knew—positively and as at first hand—what it was to be, not Lory alone now, but all the rest. Abruptly, with some great wrench of the understanding, it was almost as if momentarily he were those other wretched creatures. When Lory had brought her pack and joined him, he stood for a moment, still staring into that room.
“My God,” he said. “I wish I could do something for ’em!”
He struggled with this.