chance to get used to the idea of
being polite to a woman who had once been a burlesque actress. It
began over there in Paris. What I went through then no one knows; but
when I came back--and I would never have come back if she had not made
me--it was my friends I had to consider, and not her. It was in the
blood; it was in the life she had led, and in the life men like you and
me had taught her to live. And it had to come out."

The muscles of Mr. Caruthers's face were moving, and beyond his
control; but Van Bibber did not see this, for he was looking intently
out of the window, over the roofs of the city.

"She had every chance when she married me that a woman ever had,"
continued the older man. "It only depended on herself. I didn't try
to make a housewife of her or a drudge. She had all the healthy
excitement and all the money she wanted, and she had a home here ready
for her whenever she was tired of travelling about and wished to settle
down. And I was--and a husband that loved her as--she had
everything--everything that a man's whole thought and love and money
could bring to her. And you know what she did."

He looked at Van Bibber, but Van Bibber's eyes were still turned
towards the open window and the night.

"And after the divorce--and she was free to go where she pleased, and
to live as she pleased and with whom she pleased, without bringing
disgrace on a husband who honestly loved her--I swore to my God that I
would never see her nor her child again. And I never saw her again,
not even when she died. I loved the mother, and she deceived me and
disgraced me and broke my heart, and I only wish she had killed me; and
I was beginning to love her child, and I vowed she should not live to
trick me too. I had suffered as no man I know had suffered; in a way a
boy like you cannot understand, and that no one can understand who has
not gone to hell and been forced to live after it. And was I to go
through that again? Was I to love and care for and worship this child,
and have her grow up with all her mother's vanity and animal nature,
and have her turn on me some day and show me that what is bred in the
bone must tell, and that I was a fool again--a pitiful fond fool? I
could not trust her. I can never trust any woman or child again, and
least of all that woman's child. She is as dead to me as though she
were buried with her mother, and it is nothing to me what she is or
what her life is. I know