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That childish faith, that worked itself out in her common life, Paul Blecker set aside, in loving her. She was ignorant: he knew the world, and, he thought, very plainly saw that the Power who had charge of it suffered unneeded ills, was a traitor to the Good his own common sense and kindly feeling could conceive; which is the honest belief of most of the half-thinkers in America.
Young girls like me in these poor-genteel families, there are none of God's creatures more helpless or goaded, starving at their souls. I couldn't teach. I had no talent; but if I had, a woman's a woman: she wants something else in her life than dog-eared school-books and her wages year after year." Blecker could hardly repress a smile.
From the time I could comprehend, I knew her only hope was, to live long enough to see her boys educated, and her daughters in homes of their own. It was the old story, Doctor Blecker," with a shivering laugh more pitiful than a cry. "I've noticed it since in a thousand other houses.
"You are coming to political economy by a woman's road, Grey." "I don't know what that is. I know what my life was then. I was only a child; but when that man came and held out his hand to take me, I was willing when they gave me to him, when they sold me, Doctor Blecker. It was like leaving some choking pit, where air was given to me from other lungs, to go out and find it for my own.
Yet the town had an honest country heart in it, if it was a bit gray and crusty with age. Blecker, knowing it as he did, did not wonder the boys who left it named a village for it out in Kansas, trying to fancy themselves at home, or that one old beggar in it asked to be buried in the middle of the street, "So's I kin hear the stages a-comin' in, an' know if the old place is a-gittin' on."
There were possibilities, however, in that woman's curious traits, that Blecker, being a physician and a little of a soul-fancier, saw: nothing in McKinstry's formal, orthodox nature ran parallel with them; therefore he never would know them.
Doctor Blecker, a trifle graver and more assured than when we saw him last, sheltered her with his overcoat from the wind, taking it off for that purpose by the stile. You could see that this woman was one of the few for whom he had respect. "Your wife understands horses, Doctor. And dogs. I did not expect it of Grey. No.
The Captain said nothing, stammered a little, then, hoisting his foot on a stump, tied his shoe nervously. Blecker smiled, a queer, sorrowful smile, as if, oddly enough, he felt sorry for himself. "I'd like to think of women as you do, Mac," he said. "You never knew many?" "Only two, until now, my mother and little Sarah. They're gone now." Sarah? The Doctor was silent a moment, thinking.
Paul Blecker, who had seen a good many sides of the world, laughed to himself: the very Captain here, good, anxious, innocent as a baby, as he was, looked at the world exactly through Balfour of Burley's dead eyes, was going to cure the disease of it by the old pill of intolerance and bigotry. No wonder Paul laughed.
This Blecker, now, had been made by intercourse with such women as those he talked of: he came from the North. The Captain looked at him with a vague, moony compassion: the usual Western vision of a Yankee female in his head, Bloomer-clad, hatchet-faced, capable of anything, from courting a husband to commanding a ship.
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