Selma Cross arose and paced the room, stretching out her great arms from time to time as she walked. "You're getting back your glibness," she exclaimed, "your quick little sentences which fit in so nicely! Ah, I know them well, as other women are learning them. But I have things which you cannot answer so easily--you of the garret penances.... You find a starved woman of thirty--play with her for a fortnight, showing her everything that she can desire, and seeming to have no thought, but of her. I discover that there was not a moment in which you were so ardent that you forgot to be an analyst. I forgive that, as you might forgive things in my day's work. You put on your gray garret-garb, and forget the hearts of my people, to uncover their weaknesses before the world--you, so recently one of us, and none more drunk or drained with the dawn--than you! Such preaching is not good to the nostrils, but I forgive that. You are sick, and even the drink won't warm you, so you leave me at a moment's notice----" "There was another reason." "Hear me out, first," she commanded.... "To you, it is just, 'Adios, my dear'; to me, it is an uprooting--oh, I don't mind telling you. I was overturned in that furrow, left naked for the long burning day, but I remembered my work--the work you despise! I, who had reason to know how noble your pen can be, forgave even those first paltry letters, filled with excuses such as a cheap clerk might write. I forgave the dictation, because it said you were ill--forgave the silences.... But when you came to New York six months afterwards, and did not so much as 'phone or send me a card of greeting--Selma called in her silly tears." "It was vile ingratitude," he said earnestly. "That's where my big fault lay. I wonder if you would try to understand the only palliation. You were strangely generous and wonderful in your ways. I did not cease to think of that. Personally, you are far above the things I came to abhor. No one understands but the victim, what alcohol does to a man when it gets him down. I tried to kill myself. I became convalescent literally by force. Slowly approaching the normal again, I was glad enough to live, but the horrors never leave the mind entirely. Everything connected with the old life filled me with shuddering fear. I tell you no one hates alcohol like a drunkard fresh in his reform." "But I did not make you drink," she said impatiently. "I'm not a drink-loving woman." Charter's face flushed. The interview was becoming a farce. It had been agony for him to make this confession. She would not see that he realized his ingratitude; that it was his derangement caused by indulging low propensities which made him identify her with the days of evil. "I know that very well, Selma Cross," he said wearily, "but the stage is a part of that old life, that sick night-life that runs eternally around the belt-line."