it plain!" he cried,
despairingly.

"Wait!" She lifted her head and extended her hands to him unconsciously,
like a child. "Help me up, Bibbs." Then, when she was once more upon her
feet, she wiped her eyes and smiled upon him ruefully and faintly, but
reassuringly, as if to tell him, in that way, that she knew he had
not meant to hurt her. And that smile of hers, so lamentable, but so
faithfully friendly, misted his own eyes, for his shamefacedness lowered
them no more.

"Let me tell you what you want to tell me," she said. "You can't,
because you can't put it into words--they are too humiliating for me
and you're too gentle to say them. Tell me, though, isn't it true? You
didn't believe that I'd tried to make you fall in love with me--"

"Never! Never for an instant!"

"You didn't believe I'd tried to make you want to marry me--"

"No, no, no!"

"I believe it, Bibbs. You thought that I was fond of you; you knew I
cared for you--but you didn't think I might be--in love with you.
But you thought that I might marry you without being in love with you
because you did believe I had tried to marry your brother, and--"

"Mary, I only knew--for the first time--that you--that you were--"

"Were desperately poor," she said. "You can't even say that! Bibbs, it
was true: I did try to make Jim want to marry me. I did!" And she sank
down into the chair, weeping bitterly again. Bibbs was agonized.

"Mary," he groaned, "I didn't know you COULD cry!"

"Listen," she said. "Listen till I get through--I want you to
understand. We were poor, and we weren't fitted to be. We never had
been, and we didn't know what to do. We'd been almost rich; there was
plenty, but my father wanted to take advantage of the growth of the
town; he wanted to be richer, but instead--well, just about the time
your father finished building next door we found we hadn't anything.
People say that, sometimes, meaning that they haven't anything in
comparison with other people of their own kind, but we really hadn't
anything--we hadn't anything at all, Bibbs! And we couldn't DO anything.
You might wonder why I didn't 'try to be a stenographer'--and I wonder
myself why, when a family loses its money, people always say the
daughters 'ought to go and be stenographers.' It's curious!--as if a
wave of the hand made you into a stenographer. No, I'd been raised to be
either married comfortably or a well-to-do old maid, if I chose not
to marry. The poverty came on s