ut I couldn't do
it. I couldn't forget the old days. I couldn't forget the wide path of
life that we'd traveled together, and that he was the father of my
children--my children who will always need him!--and that he and he
alone had been my torch-bearer into the tangled wilderness of passion.

Then I tried to think of life alone, of going solitary through the
rest of my days--and I knew that my Maker had left me too warm-blooded
and too dependent on the companionship of a mate ever to turn back to
single harness. I couldn't live without a man. He might be a sorry
mix-up of good and bad, but I, the Eternal Female, would crave him as
a mate. Most women, I knew, were averse to acknowledging such things;
but life has compelled me to be candid with myself. The tragic part of
it all seems that there should and could be only one man. I had been
right when I had only too carelessly called myself a neck-or-nothing
woman.

It wasn't until later that any definite thought of injustice to me at
Dinky-Dunk's hands entered my head, since my attitude toward
Dinky-Dunk seemed to remain oddly maternal, the attitude of the mother
intent on extenuating her own. I even wrung a ghostly sort of
consolation out of remembering that it was not a young and dewy girl
who had imposed herself on his romantic imagination, for youth and
innocence and chivalric obligation would have brought a much more
dangerous fire to fight. But Lady Alicia, with all her carefully
achieved charm, could scarcely lay claim to either youth or the other
thing. Early in the morning, I knew, those level dissecting eyes of
hers would look hard, and before her hair was up she'd look a little
faded, and there'd be moments of stress and strain when her naively
insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled
child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to
precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into
untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would
probably remind a man in his reactionary moments of _ennui_ that there
are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even though it's a sustaining
wall.

And somewhere in her make-up was a strain of cruelty or she would
never have come to me the way she did, and struck at me with an open
claw. That cruelty, quite naturally, could never have been paraded
before my poor old Dinky-Dunk's eyes. It would be, later on, after
disillusionment and boredom. Then, and then o