ad flung herself into a chair to cover her face with her
hands and burst into tears. Instantly he was on his knees beside her.

"Barbe! Barbe! My beloved Barbe! Don't cry. I'm a brute. I'm a fool.
I'm not satisfied with breaking my own heart, but I must go to work
and break yours. Oh, Barbe, forgive me. I'm all to pieces. Forgive me
and let me go away and shoot myself. What's the good of a poor,
wrecked creature like me hanging on and making such a mess of things?
Let me kill myself before I kill you----"

"Oh, hush!"

Seizing his head, she pressed it against her bosom convulsively. By
the shaking of his shoulders, she felt him sob. He _was_ a poor
creature. She was saying so to herself. But just because he was,
something in her yearned over him. He _could_ be different; he could
be stronger and of value in the world if there was only some one to
handle him rightly. She could do it--if she could only learn to handle
herself. She _would_ learn to handle herself--for his sake. He was
worth saving. He had fine qualities, and a good heart most of all. It
was his very fineness which put him out of place in a world like that
of New York. He was a delicate, brittle, highly-wrought thing which
should be touched only with the greatest care, and all his life he had
been pushed and hurtled about as if he were a football player or a
business man. With the soul of a poet or a painter or a seer, he had
been treated like the typical rough-and-ready American lad, till the
sensitive nature had been brutalized, maimed, and frenzied.

She knew that. It was why she cared for him. Even when they were
children she had seen that he wasn't getting fair treatment, either at
home or in school or among the boys and girls with whom they both grew
up. He was the exception, and American life allowed only for the rule.
If you couldn't conform to the rule, you were guyed and tormented and
ejected. Among all his associates she alone knew what he suffered, and
because she knew it a vast pity made her cling to him. He had forced
himself into the life of clubs, into the life of society, into the
life of other men as other men lived their lives, and the effect on
him had been so nearly ruinous that it was no wonder if he was always
on the edge of nervous explosion. His very wealth which might have
been a protection was, under the uniform pressure of American social
habit, an incitement to him to follow the wrong way. She knew it, and
she alone. She cou