“All the time I was trying to do things for you—get you this home—furnish it as you wanted—buy you clothes—take you with me on my trips—introduce you to people in New York—hand you out more money than you’d ever be able to earn yourself—and all the time you loved another man behind my back! You were carrying on with him while I had the utmost confidence in you—at least, I refused to believe what all the town tried to tell me.” Milly began to cry. “It was little Mary,” she sobbed. “You was her father. Besides, you’d never understand how or why I loved Si. I didn’t suppose you ever could.” “I should think you’d have felt like a virago,” declared Nathan disgustedly. “What else can you call yourself?” He looked down upon her as upon some biological specimen that was exhibiting strange phenomena. “I don’t know what it means, but I can guess—and if I’m that for lovin’ Si more’n you—well, I ain’t ashamed of it! It’s bein’ done every day! You could go see a few classy films if you wasn’t so high-brow——!” “That’s plenty, Milly. You love Plumb enough to follow him into disgrace. Is that it?” “With my kind of love there ain’t no disgrace. In ‘Sex and the High Heart’ it showed where——” “And you love Milly enough to make her your legal wife?” Nathan interrupted in hard voice to the steam-fitter. “You betcha life I do! I’d——” “Then take her!” snapped Nathan contemptuously. With lips closed tightly, he turned. The episode was at an end. “Huh! You want to get rid o’ me, don’t you?—Same’s your father got rid o’ your mother! I might o’ known!” “Shut up, Mil! Don’t be a fool!” ordered Plumb. He had a man’s brain and masculine grasp of proportion, sluggish, but equipped nevertheless with a certain amount of common sense. “You mean this, Nat?” “Do I look as if I were jesting? Two wrongs never yet made a right. I wronged Milly when I took her from you. Every day since, I’ve wronged myself. I see now—as I should have seen from the case of my father and mother—that all the legal and religious promises in the world can’t affect raw nature. People mated will love, honor and cherish one another. People not mated may live in the same house, eat at the same table, sleep in the same bed for a thousand years. Every moment of those thousand years they’ll be prostitutes. I see it now. And any one who teaches or preaches differently is an ass. Get out!” Plumb heard and agreed inwardly that Nat _was_ a high-brow. “Must o’ swallowed a dictionary!” he explained afterward. But from the dangerous predicament he needed no second invitation to exit. “But I gotta get my clothes!” cried Milly, “and all my things——!” “All your ‘things’ will be sent to your mother’s house in the morning. Get out!” “Then you mean for me to get a divorce?” “I’ll get the divorce, thank you! I’ve taken this sort of thing lying down long enough. I said get out!” “Come on, Mil,” ordered Silas. “I know a place we can go for to-night. How long’ll it take you to get that divorce, Nat?”