"When you came I was only a little fool who'd bought a pair of shoes that were too tight for her. I didn't _know_ anything. I'm wise now. I know that I'm dreaming, and that if I wake up before the dream is ended I shall die."
"I've made things harder for you instead of easier," he said. "I'm terribly sorry. I meant well."
"Oh, it isn't that," she said. "Thank you a thousand thousand times. And good-night."
"Wait," he said. "Will you play with me again some time? How about Saturday?"
"No," she said. "It wouldn't be fair--to me. Good-night."
She passed through the inner door and up the narrow creaking stair to the dark tenement in which she lived; she could hear the restless breathing of her sleeping family.
"Oh, my God!" she thought, "if it weren't for _them_!"
As for the young man, having lighted a long cigar, he entered his car and drove off, muttering to himself:
"Damnation! Why does a girl like that _have_ a family!"
He never saw her again, nor was he ever haunted by the thought that he had perhaps spoiled her whole life as thoroughly as if he had taken advantage of her ignorance and her innocence.
It was spring in the South Seas when, for the first time, I went ashore at Batengo, which is the Polynesian village, and the only one on the big grass island of the same name. There is a cable station just up the beach from the village, and a good-natured young chap named Graves had charge of it. He was an upstanding, clean-cut fellow, as the fact that he had been among the islands for three years without falling into any of their ways proved. The interior of the corrugated iron house in which he lived, for instance, was bachelor from A to Z. And if that wasn't a sufficient alibi, my pointer dog, Don, who dislikes anything Polynesian or Melanesian, took to him at once. And they established a romping friendship. He gave us lunch on the porch, and because he had not seen a white man for two months, or a liver-and-white dog for two years, he told us the entire story of his young life, with reminiscences of early childhood and plans for the future thrown in.
The future was very simple. There was a girl coming out to him from the States by the next steamer but one; the captain of that steamer would join them together in holy wedlock, and after that the Lord would provide.