"Oh, I've had all the love-stuff knocked out of me. Three years of eating out my heart is about all the love-stuff I can handle for a while. He don't want that in a woman. I don't want it in him. He's just a plain, good man I never in my life could dream of having. A good home in a good town where life ain't like a red-eyed devil ready to hit in deep between the shoulder-blades. I know why he says he can see his wife in me. He knows I'm the kind was cut out for that kind of life--home and kitchen and my own parsley in my own back yard. He knows, if he marries me, carpet slippers seven nights in the week is my speed. I never want to see a 'roof,' or a music-show, or a cabaret again to the day I die. He knows I'll fit in home like a goldfish in its bowl. Life made a mistake with me, and it's going to square itself. It's fate, Kess; that's what it is--fate!" She clapped her hands to her face, sobbing down into them. He glanced about him in quick and nervous concern. "Pull yourself together there, Becker; we're in a public place." "If only I could go to him and tell him." "Well, you can't." "It's not you that keeps me. Only, I know that with his kind of man and at his age, a woman is--is one thing or another and that ends it. With a grown daughter, he wouldn't--couldn't--he's too set in his ways to know how it was with me--and--what'll I do, Kess?" "Say, I'm not going to stand in your light, if that's what's eating you. If you can get away with it, I don't wish you nothing but well. Looks to me like all right, if you want to make the try. I'll even come and break bread with you when I go out to see my Middle West trade pretty soon. That's the kind of a hairpin I am."