Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Single mothers -- Fiction; Social classes -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"But you won’t. And now that you’ve got all that you can out of me, I
suppose I can go?"
But Angelica was weak; she couldn’t endure it.
"Do you mean that you’re not even sorry?" she cried. "Can’t you think
what this means to me--what’s going to become of me? Oh, Vincent, just
_think_ what’s before me!"
"Just what always was before you. You’re bad, my girl, through and
through. You couldn’t have ended any other way. No decency, no
self-restraint. I don’t suppose I was the first man----”
"Oh, don’t!" she cried. "Don’t! You can’t realize--oh, Vincent!"
"And as for _this_, it isn’t the first time such a thing has happened in
the world. Even a young girl brought up in sheltered luxury, like you,
must have heard of such things. In fact, my dear, you must have known
quite as well as I what the consequences of our adventure might be. If
you say you didn’t, you’re lying."
She put out one hand in a sort of mute and feeble protest.
"But I didn’t think--you’d change----” Her voice faltered; she found it
almost impossible to go on. "I thought--that you--felt like I did."
"So I did," he answered. "So I do--just the same as you. Our impulses,
our reasons for going off together, were exactly the same, only I’m
honest about it and you’re not. You pretend to be heart-broken because I
don’t care for you any longer, when, as a matter of fact, you don’t care
a bit more for me. You’re an utter hypocrite!"
She was confused and crushed by his words. He was taking away from her
her very last support--her conviction that she had been misled, wronged,
sinned against. Somehow he was putting her in the wrong. She couldn’t
deny that she had gone away with him of her own free will; and yet she
knew that it _hadn’t_ been her own free will. She didn’t deny her own
guilt, but she knew that his was far greater.
"I’m not a hypocrite," she said.
"Then you’re a fool. No--we’ve done with each other, Angelica. It’s over
for both of us."
"But it isn’t over for me!" she cried. Her heart was flaming with
resentment against the hellish injustice of it--that she should have all
the suffering, all the punishment. "Just _think_ of it!" she cried.
"Can’t you realize, Vincent, how dreadful it is for me?"
"No, I can’t realize. I’m not a woman, and I don’t pretend to understand
them and their fine feelings. I can’t understand or sympathize with this
cowardly whining over physical effects which are known to every one. Did
you want anything else from me, except money, Angelica?"
"Yes, I do!" she answered. "I do want something else, and I’ll get it,
too. I want to make you suffer, and I will, too!"
"Oh, I see--the wronged woman with the baby in her arms! Well, Angelica,
go ahead! Do your worst. I don’t think you can hurt me very much."
He looked down at her with a gay, mocking smile, he put on his hat, and
was gone.
Angelica went back to her mother with the wallet.
"Well!" she began. "Here’s----” But she broke down and began to cry
wildly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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