"Why not?" asked Jim, coolly. Pen flushed and looked away. They were nearing the tent house and she spoke hastily:
"No," said Pen, "every woman has an inalienable right to bully and intimidate her own husband."
Jim laughed and left her, reluctantly. Pen went into the tent. Sara was looking flushed and tired. The look had been growing on him of late. He had been unusually tractable for a day or so and Pen's heart smote her as she greeted him. No matter how he tried her, Sara never ceased to be a pitiful and a tragic figure to her in his wrecked and aborted youth.
"Sara," she said, her voice very gentle and her touch very tender as she held a glass of water for him, "Jim wanted to come in and talk to you but I wouldn't let him."
"Because you and he quarrel so. Sara, it's a fair fight. You warned Jim that you would ruin him. He says you may have your choice of being watched or turned over to the authorities."
"He is a mutton head!" said Sara. "I suppose he thinks the crux of the matter is that séance with Freet. As if I'd do as coarse work as that! That's what I'd like, to be turned over to the authorities. Couldn't I tell a pretty story about the meeting with Freet up here? Freet actually thought Jim would come across with the contract! But that wasn't what I was after."
"Sara, when you talk like that, I despise you," said Pen.
"You despise me because I'm a cripple," returned Sara. "Why can't you be honest about it?"
"Don't you know me yet, Sara?" asked Pen, sitting down on the foot of his couch and looking at him entreatingly. "Don't you know that if you had taken your injury like a man, you'd have gotten a hold on my tenderness and respect that nothing could have destroyed? Sara, I've watched you degenerate for eight years, but I never realized to what a depth you had sunk until you came to the Project."
"What do you see in the Project," said Sara. "What does it really matter whether private or public interests control it? Who really cares?"
"Pshaw!" sneered Sara. "All Jim Manning really cares about is his own pigheaded sense of race and nationality."
"Jim needs that sense for his propelling power," said Pen. "I believe that just as soon as a man loses his sense of nationality, he loses a lot of his social force. Love of country--a man that hasn't it lacks something very fine, like family pride and honor. Jim's sense of race is the keynote to his character. And just as much as the New Englanders have lost that sense, have they lost their grip on the trend of the nation. They are the type that can't do without it."