Good or bad, she knew little and cared less, this man had come from that lost world of hers, as she was made aware by a thousand small signs, whose very existence she had forgotten; and silently, fiercely she claimed him as an equal. “I--I too was--” Slow tears drowned the rest. She could have told him how a _déclassée_ grows used to it. She knew how the mind can adjust itself to any phase of experience, and had learned that what woman has undergone, woman can undergo--yes, and be strong about it. She knew how, under the impulse of necessity, the once impossible grows to be the accepted life, and the food that could not be swallowed becomes the daily bread. When the struggle for existence becomes a hand-to-hand fight, traditions of one’s ancestry do not matter, except, possibly, that some traditions bind you to strength and silence, while others leave you free to scream. She knew what it was to forget the past and ignore the future, and survey the present with the single-hearted purpose of securing three meals a day, if possible; two, if it were not. She had forgotten with what facility she might the faces and scenes that once were dear to her. She had nothing to do with them any longer, as she knew. She might, perhaps, have heard their names without emotion. But, even in this day and generation and among this democratic people, in the soul of a woman bred as she had been the feeling for her caste is the last feeling that dies. And to her anguish she found that in her it was not yet dead. The color died from the sky, and the stars came swiftly out. She rose at last. It was time that she should be going. She stretched out the tired arms upon which she had been lying, looked at the patient hands which had long lost the beauty her face still kept, and lifted her eyes to the solemn sky. “I shall die some day,” she said, passionately. “No one can take that away from me. Thank Heaven, it is not one of the privileges a woman forfeits by marrying out of her station.” Forbes stayed three days longer; restless, wretched days whenever he thought of himself and his position; sunlit and serene whenever his facile temperament permitted him to forget them. He felt that he should be moving on, yet, having stopped, was at a loss how to proceed. Staying or going seemed equally difficult and dangerous. He had no precedents to guide his action. Nothing in his previous life and training had ever fitted him to be a fugitive. He was, as he often reminded himself, not a fugitive from justice, but from injustice; which is quite another matter, but after all hardly more comfortable. He began to suspect that he might have been a fool to come away, but was too dazed to decide intelligently whether he should go forward or back. He was still in this undecided frame of mind on the morning of the third day.