"She might have, how can you be sure? Anyhow, she should have had the chance."
There was a long silence. I was so shaken that it was hard for me to find words. "As a matter of fact," said Claire, grimly, "I thought of warning her myself. There'd have been some excitement at least! You remember--when they came out of church. You helped to stop me!"
"It would have been too late then," I heard myself saying.
"Well," she exclaimed, with fresh excitement, "it's Miss Sylvia's turn now! We'll see if she's such a grand lady that she can't get my diseases!"
I could no longer contain myself. "Claire," I cried, "you are talking like a devil!"
She picked up a powder-puff, and began to use it diligently. "I know," she said--and I saw her burning eyes in the glass--"you can't fool me. You've tried to be kind, but you despise me in your heart. You think I'm as bad as any woman of the street. Very well then, I speak for my class, and I tell you, this is where we prove our humanity. They throw us out, but you see we get back in!"
"My dear woman," I said, "you don't understand. You'd not feel as you do, If you knew that the person to pay the penalty might be an innocent little child."
"_Their_ child! Yes, it's too bad if there has to be anything the matter with the little prince! But I might as well tell you the truth--I've had that in mind all along. I didn't know just what would happen, or how--I don't believe anybody does, the doctors who pretend to are just faking you. But I knew Douglas was rotten, and maybe his children would be rotten, and they'd all of them suffer. That was one of the things that kept me from interfering and smashing him up."
I was speechless now, and Claire, watching me, laughed. "You look as if you'd had no idea of it. Don't you know that I told you at the time?"
"I suppose, you didn't understand. I'm apt to talk French when I'm excited. We have a saying: 'The wedding present which the mistress leaves in the basket of the bride.' That was pretty near telling, wasn't it?"
And the other, after watching me for a moment more, went on: "You think I'm revengeful, don't you? Well, I used to reproach myself with this, and I tried to fight it down; but the time comes when you want people to pay for what they take from you. Let me tell you something that I never told to anyone, that I never expected to tell. You see me drinking and going to the devil; you hear me talking the care-free talk of my world, but in the beginning I was really in love with Douglas van Tuiver, and I wanted his child. I wanted it so that it was an ache to me. And yet, what chance did I have? I'd have been the joke of his set for ever if I'd breathed it; I'd have been laughed out of the town. I even tried at one time to trap him--to get his child in spite of him, but I found that the surgeons had cut me up, and I could never have a child. So I have to make the best of it--I have to agree with my friends that it's a good thing, it saves me trouble! But _she_ comes along, and she has what I wanted, and all the world thinks it wonderful and sublime. She's a beautiful young mother! What's she ever done in her life that she has everything, and I go without? You may spend your time shedding tears over her and what may happen to her but for my part, I say this--let her take her chances! Let her take her chances with the other women in the world--the women she's too good and too pure to know anything about!"
