She wandered about through sleepy, grass-grown back streets and lanes drowsing in the hot afternoon sunshine and deserted as a graveyard. She met nobody but an old man hobbling with the aid of two crutches. She had a feeling that the old man looked at her as if he knew and blushed furiously when she accidentally met his eye.
She took no note of the passing of time, and did not see that the shadows had begun to grow long, when she heard Jerry's voice anxiously calling her name and immediately after saw him appear around the corner of a fence.
"Hey, Judy! What the devil?" In his tone was the irritation which follows upon relieved anxiety. "Where you bin a-hidin' to? I bin a-lookin' all over taown fer you. I was beginnin' to think sumpin'd happened you."
Without waiting an instant, she turned upon him and accused him of what he had done. Even while she accused him, she felt herself buoyed up by a quite unreasonable hope that he would be able to deny her charge. The sight of him had for the moment restored her confidence in him. The moment, however, was a short one. Instantly she saw by his face that it was true, unbelievably but inexorably true. He stood before her sheepish, contrite and ashamed.
She flashed the words at him as if each one was a sword.
"Judy, I was drunk. It happened a long time ago, afore we was married; an' it was about the one time in my life I bin drunk enough not to keep my tongue in my head. Even so I could a bit it off soon's I'd said it."
She turned without a word and started to walk back toward the town. Disgust, like an avalanche of dirty dish water, put out the clear flame of her anger. The one thought left in her mind was that she was going back only because she had to go where the baby was. Jerry came up beside her and tried to take her hand; but she snatched it away and put it behind her back.
"Judy, it ain't sech a _dreadful_ thing," he pleaded. "Course I hadn't otta done it, an' I wouldn't if I hadn't been drunk. But if you knowed haow most men is, an' haow they brag about everything like that, an' oftentimes when there hain't a bit o' truth in it, you wouldn't think so hard of me for one little slip."
He went on in this way, stumblingly trying to convince her that he was not a monster. But his pleadings fell on deaf ears, hard, young, intolerant ears that had learned from life no principles of judgment, yet were all too eager to judge. It was impossible for Jerry, out of his small experience of life and with the few words at his command, to tell her how deeply rooted in the young male is the urge to publish abroad his sexual achievements. She felt only that he was low, vile, and contemptible, no better than his cronies, the drunken young loafers whom he had, with such an unspeakable lack of delicacy, taken into his confidence, and who had been busy ever since rolling her secret on their dirty tongues. She loathed the whole odious pack of them, Jerry more than the rest. She walked on beside him silent and cold, without answering a word. Being able to make no impression on her with his pleading, Jerry too fell into sullen silence, musing on how hard she was. He felt chilled by a feeling that she was far away, that she did not belong to him, that she never had and never would belong to him as he did to her. A bitter feeling of estrangement and mutual distrust grew out of the silence like a dividing wall.