"I mean the family name, my boy." A frightful lucidity had come upon Ranny, born of the calamity itself. It was not for nothing that he had attained that sudden violent maturity of his. He saw things as they were. "You mean yourself," he said. "Jolly lot you think of me and my children if you ask me to take her back. Not me! I'll be damned first." "You married her, Randall, against the wishes of your family; and you're responsible to your family for the way she conducts herself." "I should rather think I _was_ responsible! If I wasn't--if I was a bletherin' idiot--I might take her back--" "I don't say if she leaves you again you'll take her back a second time. But you got to give her a chance. After all, she's the mother of your children. You married her." "Yes. That's where I went wrong. That's what made her do it, if you want to know. _That's_ the provocation I gave her. It's what she always had against me--the children, and my marrying her. And she was right. She never ought to have had children. I never ought to have married her--against her will." "Well, I can't think what you did it for--in such haste." "I did it," said Ranny, in his maturity, his lucidity, "because it was the way I was brought up. I suppose, come to that, I did it for all you." He saw everything now as it was. "How d'you make that out? Did it for us!" Then Ranny delivered his soul, and the escape, the outburst was tremendous, cataclysmic. "For you and your rotten respectability! What you brought me up on. What you've rammed down my throat all along. What you're thinking of now. You're not thinking of me; you're thinking of yourself, and how respectable you are, and how I've dished you. You don't want me to take my wife back because you care a rap about me and my children. It's because you're afraid. That's what it is, you're afraid. You're afraid of the rotten scandal; you're afraid of what people'll say; you're afraid of not looking respectable any more. You know what my wife's done--you know what she _is_--" "She's a woman, Randall, she's a woman." "She's a--Well, she _is_, and you know it. You know what she is, and you want me to take her back so as you can lie about it and hush it all up and pretend it isn't there. Same as you've done with my father. He's a drunkard--" "For shame, Randall," said his uncle. "He is, and you know it, and he knows it, and my mother knows it. And yet you go on lying about him and pretending. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of hearing about how good he is, and his Headaches--Headaches!" "Oh! Ranny, dear," his mother wailed, piteously. "I'm not blaming him, Mother. Poor old Humming-bird, he can't help it. It's the way he's made. I'm not blaming Virelet. She can't help it, either. It's my fault. If I'd wanted her to stick to me I oughtn't to have married her." "What ought you to have done then?" his uncle inquired, sternly.