he should be so angry
over my using the word. I thought it was fair enough. And the day I left
his house I came to you and got a job in the chorus in _The Girl
Up-stairs_. I thought that by earning my own way, building a life that
he didn't--surround, as you say--I could win his friendship. And have
his love besides. I don't suppose you would have believed there could be
such a fool in the world as I was to do that."

He took a while digesting this truly amazing statement of hers, a
half-mile perhaps of steady silent tramping. But at last he said, "No, I
wouldn't call you a fool. I call a fool a person who thinks he can get
something for nothing. You didn't think that. You were willing to pay--a
heavy price it must have been, too--for what you wanted. And I've an
idea, you know, that you never really pay without getting something;
though you don't always get what you expect. You've got something now. A
knowledge of what you can do; of what you are worth; and I don't believe
you'd trade it for what you had the day before you came to me for a
job."

"I don't know," she said raggedly. "Perhaps ..." A sob clutched at her
throat and she did not try to conclude the sentence.

"As to whether you did right or wrong in leaving him," he went on,
"you've got to figure it this way. It isn't fair to say, 'Knowing what I
know now and being what I am now, but in the situation I was in then,
I'd have done differently.' The thing you've got to take into account
is, being what you were then, suppose you hadn't gone? You thought then
that you were just his mistress, not knowing what a real mistress was
like; and you thought that by going away you could make yourself his
friend. You thought that was your great chance. Well, you couldn't have
stayed without feeling that you had thrown away your chance; without
knowing that you'd had your big thing to do and had been afraid to do
it. And that knowledge would have gone a long way toward making you the
thing you thought you were.

"Well, you did your big thing. And a person who's done that has stayed
alive anyway; and he knows that when his next big thing comes along
he'll do that too. I don't pretend that you'll always come out right in
the end if you do the big thing, but I'm pretty sure of this; that you
never come out at all if you refuse it."

His amazement over what she had done increased as he thought about it
and was testified to every now and then by grunts and snorts and little