ight as well talk this way
to Etta."

He gave her a brazen look, uttered a laugh that was like the
flinging out of a bucket of filth. "Why not? Other fellows that
have to support the family and can't afford to marry gets took
care of." Susan shrank away. But Ashbel did not notice it. "It
ain't a question of Etta," he went on. "There's you--and I don't
need to look nowhere else."

Susan had long since lost power to be shocked by any revelation
of the doings of people lashed out of all civilized feelings by
the incessant brutal whips of poverty and driven back to the
state of nature. She had never happened to hear definitely of
this habit--even custom--of incestuous relations; now that she
heard, she instantly accepted it as something of which she had
really known for some time. At any rate, she had no sense of
shock. She felt no horror, no deep disgust, simply the distaste
into which her original sense of horror had been thinned down by
constant contact with poverty's conditions--just as filth no
longer made her shudder, so long as it did not touch her own person.

"You'd better go and chase yourself round the square a few
times," said she, turning away and taking up some mending.

"You see, there ain't no way out of it," pursued he, with an
insinuating grin.

Susan gave him a steady, straight look. "Don't ever speak of it
again," said she quietly. "You ought to be ashamed--and you will
be when you think it over."

He laughed loudly. "I've thought it over. I mean what I say. If
you don't do the square thing by me, you drive me out."

He came hulking up to her, tried to catch her in his big
powerful arms. She put the table between him and her. He kicked
it aside and came on. She saw that her move had given him a
false impression--a notion that she was afraid of him, was
coquetting with him. She opened the door leading into the front
part of the flat where the Quinlan family lived. "If you don't
behave yourself, I'll call Mr. Quinlan," said she, not the least
bluster or fear or nervousness in her tone.

"What'd be the use? He'd only laugh. Why, the same thing's going
on in their family."

"Still, he'd lynch you if I told him what _you_ were trying to do."

Even Ashbel saw this familiar truth of human nature. The fact
that Quinlan was guilty himself, far from staying him from
meting out savage justice to another, would make him the more
relentless and eager. "All right," said he. "Then