"You've seen my mother," she said, "but you've seen her a poor old woman. She had everything in the world once. She gave it up for love. I've seen what love comes to. I've seen my mother with her hands callous with work and her temper sharp as a razor edge nagging my father, and my father cursing out us children. She had a whole city in love with her and she gave up everything to run away with my father. He was jealous and wanted her for himself. He got her to marry him. Then he lost his arm and they were poor and her voice went. I've seen where love goes. If I married Johnny I'd go and live at Deutra's and I'd have kids, and old Ma Deutra would hate me and scream at me just like my mother used to. It would be going back, right back in the trap I've just come out of." What she said gave me an entirely new vision of life and love. "They were married and lived happy ever afterward" was what I had read in books. Now I saw all at once the other side of the medal. It was my first contact, too, with a nature strong enough to attempt to subdue life to will. I had seen only the subservient ones who had accepted life. Deolda was a fierce and passionate reaction against destiny. It's a queer thing, when you think of it, for a girl to be brought up face to face with the wreck of a tragic passion, to grow up in the house with love's ashes and to see what were lovers turned into an old hag and a cantankerous, one-armed man nagging each other. My aunt made one more argument. "What makes you get married to any of 'em, Deolda?" Now Deolda looked at her with a queer look; then she gave a queer laugh like a short bark. "I can't stay here forever. I'm not going back to the mill." Then my aunt surprised me by throwing her arms around Deolda and kissing her and calling her "my poor lamb," while Deolda leaned up against my aunt as if she were her own little girl and snuggled up in a way that would break your heart. One afternoon soon after old Conboy brought Deolda home before tea time, and as she jumped out: "Oh, all right!" he called after her. "Have your own way; I'll marry you if you want me to!" She made him pay for this. "You see," she said to my aunt, "I told you I was going to marry him." "Well, then come out motoring tonight when you've got your dishes done," called old Conboy. "I'm going to the breakwater with Johnny Deutra tonight," said Deolda, in that awful truthful way of hers. "You see what you get," said my aunt, "if you marry that girl." "I'll get worse not marrying her," said Conboy. "I may die any minute; I've a high blood pressure, and maybe a stroke will carry me off any day. But I've never wanted anything in many years as I want to hold Deolda in my arms." "Shame on you!" cried my aunt. "An old man like you!"