“He was always generous toward me, and patient. He was always giving, giving, and never asking. I think I got used to that and just took it for granted. And then one day he came home, excited, as happy as a child ... and asked me.... It was such a little thing ... and I refused. “You know, he had been married when I first met him. An actress. It didn’t last long. She got tired of the life and wanted to go back to the stage. I think she appealed to his generosity. It would have been easy to do that. At any rate, he allowed her to go away and take their little girl. I can’t understand how he brought himself to let the little daughter go, too. I have an idea he was so troubled because _she_ wanted to go that he didn’t realize how much the child meant to him, or would come to mean. She was only a year old then. I never blamed him for that episode in his life. I just concluded that the woman was worthless. And when I married him we didn’t speak of his other marriage--nothing in connection with it. It was just as if it hadn’t happened. Then, after a year, or about a year, he--he made the one request of me. The mother had offered to give him the little girl. He wanted to bring her to me, to have her in our home. “And that made me jealous and unhappy. I can’t explain ... or defend myself. I could scarcely answer him when he spoke about it. And when I didn’t answer he looked at me, and after a little a strange expression came into his eyes. He was chilled and bewildered. He had been so happy. He couldn’t understand. He just gave it up, and the next day he was trying to pretend that nothing had come between us; that I hadn’t been ungracious and cruel. “You see, I was thinking of _her_ child, and he was thinking of his own. Mine was the woman’s--the narrow--point of view, and his was the father’s. Maybe you can understand a little of what I felt. I couldn’t have the child here in the house, while its own mother.... It would have been like giving _her_ a place in our home--the woman, I mean. You can’t really separate people by putting their bodies in different places. You see what I mean?” “Yes,” assented Baron, “I think I see quite clearly.” “And I was sure she was a bad woman. And I felt that if her child were in the house, her--her real self would be here, too. Her influence, I mean. Bodies are not everything. Sometimes they’re even the least things of all. I was afraid that other woman’s very presence would be here among us on the most sacred occasions: at bedtime, to see if her child were covered up, and in the early hours of Christmas morning, jealously looking to see what we’d given her, and jealous of us, because we were fond of her. She would be a real influence in the house. It couldn’t be helped.” “But a bad woman.... Surely a bad woman would forget,” suggested Baron.