“I’ve not bucked against anything you’ve said or done since you’ve been here,” he went on, speaking fast and grimly. “I didn’t mean to. I had my reasons. There were things that I’d have given a good deal to say to you and ask you about, but you wouldn’t let me. You wouldn’t give me a chance to square things for you--if they could be squared. You threw me down every time I tried.”
He was too wildly incomprehensible with his changes from humanness to folly. Remembering what he had attempted to say on the day he had followed her in the avenue, she was inflamed again.
“What in the name of New York slang does that mean?” she demanded.
“Never mind New York,” he answered, cool as well as grim. “A fellow that’s learned slang in the streets has learned something else as well. He’s learned to keep his eyes open. He’s on to a way of seeing things. And what I’ve seen is that you’re so doggone miserable that--that you’re almost down and out.”
This time she spoke to him in the voice with the quality of deadliness in it which she had used to her mother.
“Do you think that because you are in your own house you can be as intrusively insulting as you choose?” she said.
“No, I don’t,” he answered. “What I think is quite different. I think that if a man _has_ a house of his own, and there’s any one in big trouble under the roof of it,--a woman most of all,--he’s a cheap skate if he doesn’t get busy and try to help--just plain, straight _help_.”
He saw in her eyes all her concentrated disdain of him, but he went on, still obstinate and cool and grim.
“I guess ‘help’ is too big a word just yet. That may come later, and it mayn’t. What I’m going to have a try at now is making it easier for you--just easier.”
Her contemptuous gesture registered no impression on him, as he paused a moment and looked fixedly at her.
“You just hate me, don’t you?” It was a mere statement which couldn’t have been more impersonal to himself if he had been made of wood. “That’s all right. I seem like a low-down intruder to you. Well, that’s all right, too. But what _ain’t_ all right is what your mother has set you on to thinking about me. You’d never have thought it yourself. You’d have known better.”
“That I’m mutt enough to have a mash on you.”