Part 44 (2/2)

”I'll go in and talk with Sara.”

”Better let me,” said Jim.

”No,” said Pen, ”every woman has an inalienable right to bully and intimidate her own husband.”

Jim laughed and left her, reluctantly. Pen went into the tent. Sara was looking flushed and tired. The look had been growing on him of late. He had been unusually tractable for a day or so and Pen's heart smote her as she greeted him. No matter how he tried her, Sara never ceased to be a pitiful and a tragic figure to her in his wrecked and aborted youth.

”Sara,” she said, her voice very gentle and her touch very tender as she held a gla.s.s of water for him, ”Jim wanted to come in and talk to you but I wouldn't let him.”

Sara pushed the gla.s.s away. ”Why not?”

”Because you and he quarrel so. Sara, it's a fair fight. You warned Jim that you would ruin him. He says you may have your choice of being watched or turned over to the authorities.”

”He is a mutton head!” said Sara. ”I suppose he thinks the crux of the matter is that seance with Freet. As if I'd do as coa.r.s.e work as that!

That's what I'd like, to be turned over to the authorities. Couldn't I tell a pretty story about the meeting with Freet up here? Freet actually thought Jim would come across with the contract! But that wasn't what I was after.”

”Sara, when you talk like that, I despise you,” said Pen.

”You despise me because I'm a cripple,” returned Sara. ”Why can't you be honest about it?”

”Don't you know me yet, Sara?” asked Pen, sitting down on the foot of his couch and looking at him entreatingly. ”Don't you know that if you had taken your injury like a man, you'd have gotten a hold on my tenderness and respect that nothing could have destroyed? Sara, I've watched you degenerate for eight years, but I never realized to what a depth you had sunk until you came to the Project.”

”What do you see in the Project,” said Sara. ”What does it really matter whether private or public interests control it? Who really cares?”

”Lots of people care. Jim cares.”

”Pshaw!” sneered Sara. ”All Jim Manning really cares about is his own pigheaded sense of race and nationality.”

”Jim needs that sense for his propelling power,” said Pen. ”I believe that just as soon as a man loses his sense of nationality, he loses a lot of his social force. Love of country--a man that hasn't it lacks something very fine, like family pride and honor. Jim's sense of race is the keynote to his character. And just as much as the New Englanders have lost that sense, have they lost their grip on the trend of the nation. They are the type that can't do without it.”

Sara eyed Pen curiously. She had turned to look out over the desert distances so that Sara saw her profile clean cut against the sky. She was only a girl and yet she had lived through much. Sara looked at her n.o.ble head, high arched above her ears; at her short nose and full soft mouth, at her straight brow, all blending in an outline that was that of the thinker, infinitely sad in its intelligence.

”That was a very highbrow statement of yours, Pen,” he said, less harshly than usual. ”How did you come to think about these things?”

Pen turned to look at him. ”Marrying you made me,” she said. ”I had to use my mind. I had no family. I had no talents. I had to teach myself a sense of proportion that would keep you from wrecking me. I wanted to get to look at myself as one human living with millions of other humans and not as Pen, the center of her own universe.” Pen laughed a little wistfully. ”Since I couldn't mother children of my own, naturally, I had to mother the world.”

Sara grunted. ”Huh! Who can say my life has been altogether a failure?”

Sudden tears sprang to Pen's eyes. ”Why, Sara, what a dear thing to say!

And I thought you would remove my hair because of Jim's message.”

The sneer returned to Sara's voice. ”You ask Jim if he ever heard of locking the barn too late? Tell him to bring on his 'armed guards.'”

Pen was startled. ”Sara, what have you done?”

Sara laughed. ”If you and Jim don't know, I'm not the proper one to tell you! One of your gentleman friends is outside, evidently waiting for you.”

<script>