She was panting with the passion of what seemed an accusation of him with all mankind. He added one more to his list of indictments against nature as God had made it. Here she was, a lure, innocent, he could have sworn, backed up against the defenses of her ignorance, and the whole machinery of nature was moving upon her, seeking, with its multitudinous hands, to pull her in and utilize her for its own ends.
"Never mind," he said harshly. "Don't try to understand things. You can't. We can't any of us. Only I'll tell you how you looked to me, that first minute. You looked like the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ."
She shrank a little. He had touched, he saw, innocent prejudices.
"No," he said, "not that nor anything. But you see how good you looked to me. It doesn't hurt any of us to be Catholic, if we're good."
"I didn't mean anything," she said humbly. "Only there ain't many round here."
"You say your husband is religious. Does he go to church?"
"Yes," she answered soberly, and also with a kind of wonder at a man's accomplishing so dull an observance. "We go twice every Sunday, an' Sunday school an' evenin' meetin' besides."
"No," she said, looking rueful, as if trusting he might forgive her. "I git sleepy."
At this Raven laughed and she glanced at him mildly, as if wandering what he had found to please him. He had been thinking.
"Now," he said, "we must plan what you're going to do. You won't let me send you and the baby away to stay awhile?"
"Then what are we going to do? Can't you let me go to him and tell him, man to man, what an infernal fool he is?"
"What is going to happen? You can't go home."
"Oh, yes, I can," said she. "I always do. It works off. Maybe it's worked off now. He gits all wore out actin' the way he does, an' then he's terrible scared for fear I've made way with myself, an' he's all bowed down."
"Oh!" said Raven. "And you've got him where you want him. And you settle down and wait for another spell. How long do you generally stay away?"
"Long's I can," she answered simply. "Till I'm afraid baby'll git cold. I keep his little things where I can ketch 'em up an' run. But sometimes he 'most gits a chill."
The yearning of anxiety in her voice was intense enough, he thought, to balance the grief of all the mothers bereft by Herod.