The Fighting Chance

"Doesn't she ever mention Stephen Siward?"

"Usually. She knows I like him."

"She likes him, too," said Leila, looking at him steadily.

"I know it. Everybody likes him--or did. I do, yet."

"I do, too," observed Mrs. Mortimer coolly. "I was in love with him. He was only a boy then."

Plank nodded in silence.

"Where is he now--do, you know?" she asked. "Everybody says he's gone to the devil."

"He's in the country somewhere," replied Plank cautiously. "I stopped in to see him the other day, but nobody seemed to know when he would return."

Mrs. Mortimer tossed her cigarette onto the hearth. For a long interval of silence she lay there in her chair, changing her position restlessly from moment to moment; and at length she lay quite still, so long that Plank began to think she had fallen asleep in her chair.

He rose. She did not stir, and, passing her, he instinctively glanced down. Her cheeks, half buried against the back of the chair, were overflushed; under the closed lids the lashes glistened wet in the lamplight.

Surprised, embarrassed, he halted, as though afraid to move; and she sat up with a nervous shake of her shoulders.

"What a life!" she said, under her breath; "what a life for a woman to lead!"

"Wh-whose?" he blurted out.

"Mine!"

He stared at her uneasily, finding nothing to say. He had never before heard anything like this from her.

"Can't anybody help me out of it?" she said quietly.

"Who? How? … Do you mean--"

"Yes, I mean it! I mean it! I--"

And suddenly she broke down, in a strange, stammering, tearless way, opening the dry flood-gates over which rattled an avalanche of words--bitter, breathless phrases rushing brokenly from lips that shrank as they formed them.

Plank sat inert, the corroding echo of the words clattering in his ears. And after a while he heard his own altered voice sounding persistently in repetition: "Don't say those things, Leila; don't tell me such things."

"Why? Don't you care?"

"Yes, yes, I care; but I can't do anything! I have no business to hear--to see you this way."

"To whom can I speak, then, if I can not speak to you? To whom can I turn? Where am I to turn, in all the world?"

"I don't know," he said fearfully; "the only way is to go on."

"What else have I done? What else am I doing?" she cried. "Go on? Am I not trudging on and on through life, dragging the horror of it behind me through the mud, except when the horror drags me? To whom am I to turn--to other beasts like him?--sitting patiently around, grinning and slavering, awaiting their turn when the horror of it crushes me to the mud?"