you're forgetting that when the man and the woman are through with youth
there is a reckoning which gives the man all the best of it. His
wrong-doing isn't stamped upon him. He is respected. He may be poor, but
he isn't shunned."

"That's more of the same lie. Did you ever see a poor man--a really poor
man--who was respected? There may be two or three of the people who know
him best who will give him credit for certain things--if he denies himself
to pay a debt, or forfeits his rest to sit up with a sick neighbor. But
take the world as a whole, doesn't it ride over the man who's got nothing?
Isn't he dreaded like a plague? Isn't he a kill-joy? I don't care what a
woman's been, she's as well off. A few people will give her credit for the
good she does, and that's all a man can hope for, if he's been generous
enough or enough alive to let his money go. No, you can't build up any
fences, Sylvia. We're all in the same herd."

She felt oppressed by the hardness, the relentlessness, of his words, his
manner. She could not respond to him. But she knew that everything this
man said, and everything he was, left out of the account all those
qualities which make for hope and aspirations and faith.

Her glance, resting upon him as from a great distance, seemed to irritate
him. "After all, Sylvia," he said, "you're putting on an awful lot of silk
that don't belong to you. Suppose we say that you'd have kept away from me
if you hadn't been too much influenced. There are other things to be
remembered. Peterson, for example. Remember Peterson? I watched you and
him together a good bit. You'll never tell me you wasn't loose with him."

Much of her strength and pride returned to her at this. Whatever the truth
was, she knew that Fectnor had no right to bring such a charge against
her. "Your language is very quaint at times," she said. A curve of disdain
hovered about her lips. "I'm not aware of being, or of ever having been,
loose in any way. I can't think where such a word originated."

"You know what I mean well enough. And some of those young fellows--the
soldiers and railroaders--I don't suppose any of them have got anything on
you, either?"

"They haven't, Fectnor!" she exclaimed hotly. She resolved to have nothing
more to say to him. She felt that his brutality gave her the right to have
done with him. And then her glance was arrested by his powerful hand,
where it lay on the table beside him. It was blunt-fingered and broad