forced him to keep irregular hours; thus she could
pretend to herself that his absences were certainly because of
office duty. Still, whenever he was gone overnight, she became
unhappy--not the crying kind of unhappiness; to that she was
little given--but the kind that lies awake and aches and with
morbid vivid fancy paints the scenes suspicion suggests, and
stares at them not in anger but in despair. She was always
urging herself to content herself with what she was getting. She
recalled and lived again the things she had forgotten while
Roderick was wholly hers--the penalties of the birth brand of
shame--her wedding night--the miseries of the last period of her
wanderings with Burlingham--her tenement days--the dirt, the
nakedness, the brutal degradation, the vermin, the savage cold.
And the instant he returned, no matter how low-spirited she had
been, she was at once gay, often deliriously gay--until soon his
awakened suspicion as to what she had been up to in his absence
quieted her. There was little forcing or pretense in this
gayety; it bubbled and sparkled from the strong swift current of
her healthy passionate young life which, suspended in the icy
clutch of fear when he was away from her, flowed as freely as the
brooks in spring as soon as she realized that she still had him.

Did she really love him? She believed she did. Was she right?
Love is of many degrees--and kinds. And strange and confused
beyond untangling is the mixture of motives and ideas in the
mind of any human being as to any other being with whom his or
her relations are many sided.

Anyone who had not been roughly seized by destiny and forced to
fight desperately weaponless might have found it difficult to
understand how this intelligent, high-spirited girl could be so
reasonable--coarsely practical, many people would have said. A
brave soul--truly brave with the unconscious courage that lives
heroically without any taint of heroics--such a soul learns to
accept the facts of life, to make the best of things, to be
grateful for whatever sunshine may be and not to shriek and
gesticulate at storm. Suffering had given this sapling of a girl
the strong fiber that enables a tree to push majestically up
toward the open sky. Because she did not cry out was no sign
that she was not hurt; and because she did not wither and die of
her wounds was only proof of her strength of soul. The weak wail
and the weak succumb; the strong persist--and