wouldn't have—"

"But I couldn't help it. That's what you don't seem to understand."

"No; I'm afraid I don't."

"Would you try to understand—if I were to tell you?"

"I think I know already most of what you'd30 have to say. She's a woman whom you knew long before you knew me—and from whom you've never been able—"

"She was the daughter of a Swedish Lutheran pastor—dead now—established in New Jersey. In some way she drifted to the stage. Her name was Margarethe Kastenskjold. When she went on the stage she made it Maggie Clare. She had about as much talent for the theater as a paper doll. When I first knew her she was still getting odd jobs in third and fourth rate companies. Since then she hasn't played at all."

"I understand. There's been no need of it. She's quite well dressed."

"Let me go on, will you, Edith? I was about two or three and twenty then. She may have been a year or two older. She was living at that time with Billy Cummings. And somehow it happened—after Billy died—and she was stranded—"

She made an appealing gesture. "Please! I know how those things come about—or I can easily imagine. In your case—I'd—I'd rather not try." She got the words out somehow without breaking down.31

"All the same, Edith," he went on, "you'll have to try—if you're going to do me anything like justice. If she hadn't been a refined, educated sort of girl, entirely at sea in her surroundings, and stranded—stranded for money, mind you, next door to going to starve—and no chance of getting a job, because she couldn't act a little bit—if it hadn't been for all that—"

"Oh, I know how you'd be generous!"

"Yes; but yo