rd Destiny...." She
began to wring her hands nervously. "It seems like telling an idle tale.
When you frame the sentences they seem to have existed in just that form
always. I mean, losing my mother when I was twelve; and the dreadful
poverty of our home and its dulness, and the way my father sat in the sun
and seemed unable to do anything. I don't believe he _was_ able to do
anything. There's the word Destiny again. We lived in what's called the
Mexican section, where everybody was poor. What's the meaning of it; there
being whole neighborhoods of people who are hungry half the time?

"I was still nothing but a child when I began to notice how others escaped
from poverty a little--the Mexican girls and women I lived among. It
seemed to be expected of them. They didn't think anything of it at all. It
didn't make any difference in their real selves, so far as you could see.
They went on going to church and doing what little tasks they could find
to do--just like other women. The only precaution they took when a man
came was to turn the picture of the Virgin to the wall...."

Harboro had sat down again and was regarding her darkly.

"I don't mean that I felt about it just as they did when I got older. You
see, they had their religion to help them. They had been taught to call
the thing they did a sin, and to believe that a sin was forgiven if they
went and confessed to the priest. It seemed to make it quite simple. But I
couldn't think of it as a sin. I couldn't clearly understand what sin
meant, but I thought it must be the thing the happy people were guilty of
who didn't give my father something to do, so that we could have a decent
place to live in. You must remember how young I was! And so what the other
girls called a sin seemed to me ... oh, something that was untidy--that
wasn't nice."

Harboro broke in upon her narrative when she paused.

"I'm afraid you've always been very fastidious."

She grasped at that straw gratefully. "Yes, I have been. There isn't one
man in a hundred who appeals to me, even now." And then something, as if
it were the atmosphere about her, clarified her vision for the moment, and
she looked at Harboro in alarm. She knew, then, that he had spoken
sarcastically, and that she had fallen into the trap he had set for her.
"Oh, Harboro! You!" she cried. She had not known that he could be unkind.
Her eyes swam in tears and she looked at him in agony. And in that moment
it seemed to him that