“I think I understand well enough, Sue,” said he. “It's the”--he looked again about the kitchen and out the window--“it's the setting! I hadn't pictured you as swinging so far to this extreme Though, as you know, there in the Village, I have been rather conservative in my feelings about you.” “I know, Henry.” She settled back on her heels. He saw how subdued she was. The tears were not far from her eyes. “I've been all wrong.” “Wrong, Sue?” “Absolutely. In all I said and tried to do in the Village.” He was shaking his head; but she continued: “I was cutting at the roots of my own life. I disowned every spiritual obligation. I put my faith in Nietzsche and the Russian crowd, in egotism. Henry”'--her eyes unmistakably filled now'; her voice grew unsteady--“once my father came over into the Village after me. He tried to get me to come home. I was playing at the Crossroads then.” “Yes,” said he shortly, “I remember that time.” “I had on my boy costume. He came straight to the theater and I had to go out front and talk with him. We quarreled--” “I know,” said he quickly, “I was there.” He saw that she was in the grip of an emotional revulsion and wished he could stop her. But he couldn't. Suddenly she seemed like a little girl. “Don't you see, Henry!” She threw out her hands. “Do you think it would be any good--now--to tell me I'm not partly responsible. If I--if--” she caught herself, stiffened up; there was a touch of her old downrightness in the way she came out with, “Henry, he wouldn't have--killed himself!” Her voice was a whisper. “He wouldn't!” The Worm smoked and smoked. He couldn't tell her that he regarded her father as a hypocritical old crook, and that her early revolt against the home within which the man had always wished to confine her had, as he saw it, grown out of a sound instinct. You couldn't expect her, now, to get all that into any sort of perspective. Her revolt dated back to her girlish struggle to get away to school and later, to college. Sue was forgetting now how much of this old story she had let him see in their many talks. Why, old Wilde had tried to change the course of her college studies to head her away from modernism into the safer channels of pietistic tradition. The Worm couldn't forgive him for that. And then, the man's dreadful weekly, and his curious gift of using his great emotional power to draw immense sums of money from thousands of faithful readers in small towns and along country lanes, he hadn't killed himself on Sue's account. It was known, now, that the man had lived in an awful fear. It was known that he had the acid right at hand in both office and home, the acid he had finally drunk.... She was speaking. The Worm smoked on. “I wonder if you really know what happened.” “What happened?” he repeated, all at sea.