p to--to help make up to you for what you
must have suffered. We didn't think you'd hold us off like this."

His eyes narrowed. He looked away at the cedars on the hills painted in
lustrous blues and greens and purples, and at the slopes below burnt to
exquisite color lights by the fires of fall. But what he saw was a gray
prison wall with armed men in the towers.

"If I could tell you!" He said it in a whisper, to himself, but she just
caught the words.

"Won't you try?" she said, ever so gently.

He could not sully her innocence by telling of the furtive whisperings
that had fouled the prison life, made of it an experience degrading and
corrosive. He told her, instead, of the externals of that existence, of
how he had risen, dressed, eaten, worked, exercised, and slept under
orders. He described to her the cells, four by seven by seven, barred,
built in tiers, faced by narrow iron balconies, each containing a stool,
a chair, a shelf, a bunk. In his effort to show her the chasm that
separated him from her he did not spare himself at all. Dryly and in
clean-cut strokes he showed her the sordidness of which he had been the
victim and left her to judge for herself of its evil effect on his
character.

When he had finished he knew that he had failed. She wept for pity and
murmured, "You poor boy.... You poor boy!"

He tried again, and this time he drew the moral. "Don't you see, I'm a
marked man--marked for life." He hesitated, then pushed on. "You're fine
and clean and generous--what a good father and mother, and all this have
made you." He swept his hand round in a wide gesture to include the sun
and the hills and all the brave life of the open. "If I come too near
you, don't you see I taint you? I'm a man who was shut up because--"

"Fiddlesticks! You're a man who has been done a wrong. You mustn't grow
morbid over it. After all, you've been found innocent."

"That isn't what counts. I've been in the penitentiary. Nothing can wipe
that out. The stain of it's on me and can't be washed away."

She turned on him with a little burst of feminine ferocity. "How dare you
talk that way, Dave Sanders! I want to be proud of you. We all do. But
how can we be if you give up like a quitter? Don't we all have to keep
beginning our lives over and over again? Aren't we all forever getting
into trouble and getting out of it? A man is as good as he makes himself.
It doesn't matter what outside thing has happened to him. Do you d