so kind. I had come from above and was going down. She had
come from the dregs; she was going up. We met on the way. I married her,
not because I loved her, but because she loved me and I could not
understand it. She was a lonely, tired little gutter-snipe, who had gone
on the stage, had had no success whatever, and whose pale red hair was
always stringing down around her neck and eyes; but even then I could
not see why she picked me out for her devotion. She was like a dog in
her faithfulness. I can see her now as she was one night, snarling and
showing her teeth, keeping the police from taking me to a patrol box. I
can see her cooking steak over a gas jet. She thought my name was John
Chalmers. I learned to love her at last. I learned to love her, and
because of it I learned to hate myself. She deserved so much and had so
little from me beside my temper, my wildness, and abuse.

When we were at our wits' end for pennies to buy food, the little girl
came. The only thing we had not pawned was a gold locket that had never
been off her neck because it was wished on by her mother and had always
kept her from harm, as she said. She took it off and put it on the
baby's neck and tears came to my eyes--the first in thirty-five years.

"We will call her Mary," I said, choking with happiness.

Four hours later I was on a wharf, crawling around on my hands and knees
in the madness of alcohol, with a New York policeman and a gang of
longshoremen roaring with laughter at my predicament. It was on that
occasion that, as my brain cleared, I saw what I had done. I had sworn a
thousand times never to do it. And now it had come about. I had become
responsible for another living human thing with the blood of my veins
coursing in its own! I had committed the crime of all crimes!

To describe the horror of this thought is impossible. It never left me.
I began to devise a means to undo this dreadful work of mine. I prayed
for days--savagely and breaking out into curses--that the little
laughing, mocking thing should die.

"She has your eyes," said Mary, looking up at me with a smile on her
gaunt, starved face.

I rushed from the dirty lodgings like a man with a fiend in pursuit; the
words followed me. I roared out in my pain.

"I will do it!" I said over and over again. "I will kill the child. I
will kill it."

I believed I was right. I believed the best of me and not the worst of
me had spoken. I believed I must atone for my crime