, when you handed me out the bill of fare, and
I ordered beefsteak. And it was like that when--when he came along
--I didn't do what I thought I was going to do. It's terrible to fall in
love, isn't it? I mean the real thing. I've read in books that it only
comes once, and I guess it's so."

Fortunately she seemed to expect no answer 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, an