to this query. She was
staring at the wall with unseeing eyes.

"I never thought of marrying him, from the first. He could have done
anything with me--he was so good and generous--and it was him I was
thinking about. That's love, isn't it? Maybe you don't believe a woman
like me knows what love is. You've got a notion that goin' downhill,
as I've been doing, kills it, haven't you? I Wish to God it did--but
it don't: the ache's there, and sometimes it comes in the daytime, and
sometimes at night, and I think I'll go crazy. When a woman like me is
in love there isn't anything more terrible on earth, I tell you. If a
girl's respectable and good it's bad enough, God knows, if she can't
have the man she wants; but when she's like me--it's hell. That's the
only way I can describe it. She feels there is nothing about her that's
clean, that he wouldn't despise. There's many a night I wished I could
have done what Garvin did, but I didn't have the nerve."

"Don't say that!" he commanded sharply.

"Why not? It's the best way out."

"I can see how one might believe it to be," he answered. Indeed,
it seemed that his vision had been infinitely extended, that he had
suddenly come into possession of the solution of all the bewildered,
despairing gropings of the human soul. Only awhile ago, for instance,
the mood of self-destruction had been beyond his imagination: tonight
he understood it, though he still looked upon it with horror. And he saw
that his understanding of her--or of any human being--could never be of
the intellect. He had entered into one of those astounding yet simple
relationships wherein truth, and truth alone, is possible. He knew that
such women lied, deceived themselves; he could well conceive that
the image of this first lover might have become idealized in her
vicissitudes; that the memories of the creature-comforts, of first
passion, might have enhanced as the victim sank. It was not only because
she did not attempt to palliate that he believed her.

"I remember the time I met him,--it was only four years ago last spring,
but it seems like a lifetime. It was Decoration Day, and it was so
beautiful I went out with another girl to the Park, and we sat on the
grass and looked at the sky and wished we lived in the country. He was
in an automobile; I never did know exactly how it happened,--we looked
at each other, and he slowed up and came back and asked us to take a
ride. I had never been in one of those thing