ally, his altered thoughts now on Tenney. "He's
jealous."

She broke into a sob that seemed to rend her and then pulled herself up
and sat silent. But he could see, from her shadowy outline through his
oblique vision, that she was shaking horribly.

"Can't you," he said, "make him understand, make him see how--how
tremendously you love him?"

That was pretty mawkish, he thought, as he said it, but he meant it, he
meant volumes more. Flood the man with kindness, open the doors of her
beauty and let him see how really incorruptible she was, how loyal, how
wronged. For, with every minute of her company, he was the more
convinced of her inviolate self. Whatever the self had been through, now
it was motherhood incarnate. What was she saying to this last?

"Be nice to him?" she asked, "that kind o' way?" And he saw, as she did,
that he had meant her to drown the man's jealous passion in passion of
her own. "He thinks," she said bitterly, "that's the kind o' woman I
am."

Then he looked with her upon the barricaded road of her endeavor.

"I can't even," she said, "have the house pretty when he comes home an'
be dressed up so's he'll have a pleasant evenin' but he thinks--that's
the kind o' woman I am." The last she said as if she had said it many
times before and it held the concentrated bitterness of her hateful
life. "An'," she added, turning upon him and speaking fiercely, as if he
had been the one to accuse her, "it's true. It is the kind o' woman I
am. An' I don't want to be. I want to set down with my sewin' an' watch
the baby playin' round. What is it about me? What makes 'em foller me
an' offer me things an' try, one way or another, to bring me down? What
is it?"

She was panting with the passion of what seemed an accusation of him
with all mankind. He added one more to his list of indictments against
nature as God had made it. Here she was, a lure, innocent, he could have
sworn, backed up against the defenses of her ignorance, and the whole
machinery of nature was moving upon her, seeking, with its multitudinous
hands, to pull her in and utilize her for its own ends.

"Never mind," he said harshly. "Don't try to understand things. You
can't. We can't any of us. Only I'll tell you how you looked to me, that
first minute. You looked like the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ."

She shrank a little. He had touched, he saw, innocent prejudices.

"Are you a Roman Catholic?" she asked.

"No," he said, "not that nor