"It was too much, I suppose, to expect you to understand how I failed. I never ran after women. That wasn't my weakness. I never wanted to do any of the things I did. I never wanted to throw you over. I never wanted to marry Geneva. I never wanted to ruin either of your lives. I never wanted to stay in this God-forsaken solitude. I never wanted to let drink get a hold on me. I did not want to do a single one of these things; but I did them, every one. And you will never understand how that could be." She shook her head. "It doesn't matter now. It isn't worth thinking about." "All the same I wish you could understand that I was not the kind of man to do the things that I did. I was a different sort of fellow entirely. But what I was never seemed strong enough to withstand the pull of what I was not. Of course, you'll never see that. You'll just go on thinking I was born rotten inside. Perhaps you're right. I don't know. I can't work it out." She looked through him and beyond him to the brown solitude of the winter fields. The sunken roads were swimming in melted snow; the bushes were like soaked rags; the trees were dripping with a fluid moisture which was heavier than rain. From the sodden ground a vapour steamed up and floated like a miasma on the motionless air. "Men like you ought to have been sent to the war," she said. "They wouldn't take me. I was too old, and besides I've got the drink habit." "And you blame somebody else for that, I suppose?" "No, I don't blame anybody. I don't blame anybody for anything. Least of all myself. It was the way things turned out. Strange as it may seem to you, I always did the best that I could. If Father had died sooner, it might have been different. But everything happened too late. The broomsedge grew over me before I could get away." Exultation flared up and then died down to ashes. "You ruined Five Oaks, and I saved it," she said. "Yes, you have done well with the farm." Twenty-five years of toil and self-denial, and in the end only: "You have done well with the farm!" "That shows what you can do even with poor land when you put your heart into it," he added. "Not the heart, but the head," she retorted sharply, as she went past him into the cabin. VI When the spring came and the epidemic was over, she had won the loyal friendship of the poorer tenant farmers and the negro landowners; but her energy and her resilience were less than they had ever been in her life.