"Seems to me that a woman who sticks by a man when he goes clean to hell must amount to something," observed Bayard, gazing at him pointedly.
"Maybe ... in some ways, but who the devil wants that kind hanging around his neck?" He pushed his plate away and stared surlily out through the door. Bayard tilted back in his chair and looked the Easterner in the face critically.
"Suppose somebody was to come along an' tell you they was goin' to take her off your hands. What'd you say then?"
"What do you mean?" disgruntled at the challenge in Bayard's query.
"Just what I say. You've been tellin' me what a bad mess mixin' with women is. I'm askin' you what you'd do if somebody tried to take your woman. You say it's bad, bein' tied up. How about it, if somebody was to step in an' relieve you?"
"That's different," he said. "To want to be away from a woman until she got some common sense, and to have another man _take_ your wife are two different things. To have a man take your wife would make anybody want to kill, no matter what trouble you might have had with her. Breaking up marriages, taking something that belongs to another man, has nothing to do with what I was talking about."
"You don't want her yourself. You don't want anybody else to have her. Is that it?"
"Didn't I say that those were two different--"
"You want to look out, Neighbor!" Bayard said, with a smile, dropping the forelegs of his chair to the floor and leaning his elbows on the table. "You're talking one thing and meaning another. You want to keep your head, if you want to keep your wife. Don't make out you want to let go when you really want to hang on. Women are funny things. They'll stick to men like a burr, they'll take abuse an' suffer and give no sign of quittin', because they want love, gentleness, and they hate to give up thinkin' they'll get it from the man they'd planned would give it to 'em.
"But some day, while they're stickin' to a man who don't appreciate 'em, they'll see happiness goin' by ... then, they're likely to get it. And sometime that's goin' to happen to your wife; she'll see happiness somewhere else an' she'll go after it; then, she won't be around your neck, but somebody else'll have her!