little longer you'll see what complex blunderers we all are:
how we're struck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes--and
then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have
to set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit,
the precious things we'd smashed to atoms without knowing
it. Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken
bits."

She looked up quickly. "That's what I feel: that you ought
to----"

He stood up, interrupting her with a gesture. "Oh, don't--
don't say what you're going to! Men don't give their lives
away like that. If you won't have mine, it's at least my
own, to do the best I can with."

"The best you can--that's what I mean! How can there be a
'best' for you that's made of some one else's worst?"

He sat down again with a groan. "I don't know! It seemed
such a slight thing--all on the surface--and I've gone
aground on it because it was on the surface. I see the
horror of it just as you do. But I see, a little more
clearly, the extent, and the limits, of my wrong. It's not
as black as you imagine."

She lowered her voice to say: "I suppose I shall never
understand; but she seems to love you..."

"There's my shame! That I didn't guess it, didn't fly from