That’s what I’ve never forgiven myself for.  She was a woman who stood for fine things in New Orleans.  A good woman whom the whole town pitied!  A no-’count son squandering her fortune and dragging down the family name.  If only I had known all that then!  She would have helped me if I had appealed to her.  She wouldn’t have let things turn out secretly—­the way they did.  She would have helped me.  I—­You—­Why have you come here to jerk knives out of my heart after it’s got healed with the points sticking in?  You’re nothing to me.  You’re skulking for a reason.  You’ve been hanging around, getting pointers about me.  My life is my own!  You get out!”

“The girl.  She well?”

It was a quiet question, spoken in the key of being casual, and Hattie, whose heart skipped a beat, tried to corral the fear in her eyes to take it casually, except that her eyelids seemed to grow old even as they drooped.  Squeezed grape skins.

“You get out, Morton,” she said.  “You’ve got to get out.”

He made a cigarette in an old, indolent way he had of wetting it with his smile.  He was handsome enough after his fashion, for those who like the rather tropical combination of dark-ivory skin, and hair a lighter shade of tan.  It did a curious thing to his eyes.  Behind their allotment of tan lashes they became neutralized.  Straw colored.

“She’s about sixteen now.  Little over, I reckon.”

“What’s that to you?”

“Blood, Hattie.  Thick.”

“What thickened it, Morton—­after sixteen years?”

“Used to be an artist chap down in Rio.  On his uppers.  One night, according to my description of what I imagined she looked like, he drew her.  Yellow hair, I reckoned, and sure enough—­”

“You’re not worthy of the resemblance.  It wouldn’t be there if I had the saying.”

“You haven’t,” he said, suddenly, his teeth snapping together as if biting off a thread.

“Nor you!” something that was the whiteness of fear lightening behind her mask.  She rose then, lifting her chair out of the path toward the door and flinging her arm out toward it, very much after the manner of Miss Robinson in Act II.

“You get out, Morton,” she said, “before I have you put out.  They’re closing the theater now.  Get out!”

“Hattie,” his calm enormous, “don’t be hasty.  A man that has come to his senses has come back to you humble and sincere.  A man that’s been sick.  Take me back, Hattie, and see if—­”

“Back!” she said, lifting her lips scornfully away from touching the word.  “You remember that night in that little room on Peach Tree Street when I prayed on my knees and kissed—­your—­shoes and crawled for your mercy to stay for Marcia to be born?  Well, if you were to lie on this floor and kiss my shoes and crawl for my mercy I’d walk out on you the way you walked out on me.  If you don’t go, I’ll call a stage hand and make you go.  There’s one coming down the corridor now and locking the house.  You go—­or I’ll call!”