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“It isn’t easy to find opportunity to cook or nurse. If it were as easy to earn a living in a pure way as it is in a vicious way all men would be rich and virtuous. But what had you planned to do after your divorce?”

“Oh, I’m going to travel for two years. Then I’ll try to settle down.”

“What you need is a good husband and a little cottage where you’d have to cook your own food–and tend the baby.”

“I wouldn’t cook for any man living,” she broke in, to express her bitterness that he could so coldly dispose of her future. “Oh, this terrible train! Can’t it go faster? If I’d realized what a trip this was, I wouldn’t have started.”

“This is the route you all go,” he replied with grim humor, and his words pictured a ceaseless stream of divorcees.

She resented his classing her with the rest, but she simply said: “You despise me, don’t you? But what can we do? You can’t expect us to live with men we hate, can you? That would be worse than Mrs. Shellberg.”

“No, I don’t expect that of you. I’d issue a divorce coupon with every marriage certificate, and done with it,” he said, in desperate disgust. “Then this whole cursed business would be done away with. It isn’t a question of our laxity of divorce laws,” he said, after a pause, “it’s a question of the senseless severity of the laws in other States. That’s what throws this demoralizing business into our hands here.”

“It pays, don’t it? I know I’ve paid for everything I’ve had.”

“Yes, that’s the demoralizing thing. It draws a gang of conscienceless attorneys here, and it draws us who belong here off into dirty work, and it brings us into contact with men and women–I’m sick of the whole business.”

She had hardly followed him in his generalizations. She brought him back to the personal.

“You’re sick of me, I know you are!” She leaned her head on the window pane. Her eyes closed. “Oh, I wish my heart would stop beating!” she said, in a low tone.

Allen, sitting so close behind them, was forced to hear her, so piercingly sweet was her voice. He trembled for fear some one else might hear her. It seemed like profanation that any one but the woman’s God should hear this outcry of a quivering, writhing soul.

She faced her companion again. “You’re the only man I know, now, that I respect, and you despise me.”

“No, I don’t; I pity you.”

“That’s worse. I want you to help me. Oh, if you could go with me, or if I could be with you!” Her gloved hands strained together in the agony of her desire.

His calm lips did not waver. He did not smile even about the eyes. He knew her cry sprang from her need of a brother, not from the passion of a woman.

“Our home is yours, just as long as you can bear the monotony of our simple lives,” he said, in his quiet way, but it was deep-throated and unmistakable in its sincerity.

She laid her hand on his arm and clasped it hard, then turned away her head, and they rode in silence.

After they left the car, Allen sat with savage eyes and grimly set mouth, going over the problem again and again. He saw that young and helpless creature walking the gantlet between endless ranks of lustful, remorseless men, snatching at her in selfish, bestial desire.

It made him bitter and despairing to think that women should be helpless–that they should need some man to protect them against some other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, but their young.

He tried to breathe a sigh of relief that she had gone out of his life but–he could not. It was not so easy to shake off the shadow of his responsibility. He followed her on her downward path till he saw her stretching out her hands in pitiful need to casual acquaintances–alone and without hope; still petite, still dainty in spite of all, still with flashes of wit, and then—-