III
She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more
sharply the vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the
ancient customs of the land by chewing tobacco. She would
have preferred a prettier vice—gambling or a mistress. For
these she might have found a luxury of forgiveness. She could
not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of fiction who
chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man
of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the
hairy-chested heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch
a pallid softness in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the
battle. Spitting did not identify him with rangers riding the
buttes; it merely bound him to Gopher Prairie—to Nat Hicks
the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender.
"But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're
all filthy in some things. I think of myself as so superior,
but I do eat and digest, I do wash my dirty paws and scratch.
I'm not a cool slim goddess on a column. There aren't any!
He gave it up for me. He stands by me, believing that every
one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages—in a storm of meanness
that's driving me mad.. . . it will drive me mad."
All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when
she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled
maternally at his secret.
She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental
intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches
and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which
a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all
a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the
doubt—without answering it.
