"Why, Ashbel," said Susan, patting him on the shoulder."You and I are like brother and sister.You might as well talk this way to Etta."He gave her a brazen look, uttered a laugh that was like the flinging out of a bucket of filth."Why not? Other fellows that have to support the family and can't afford to marry gets took care of." Susan shrank away.But Ashbel did not notice it."It ain't a question of Etta," he went on."There's you--and I don't need to look nowhere else."Susan had long since lost power to be shocked by any revelation of the doings of people lashed out of all civilized feelings by the incessant brutal whips of poverty and driven back to the state of nature.She had never happened to hear definitely of this habit--even custom--of incestuous relations; now that she heard, she instantly accepted it as something of which she had really known for some time.At any rate, she had no sense of shock.She felt no horror, no deep disgust, simply the distaste into which her original sense of horror had been thinned down by constant contact with poverty's conditions--just as filth no longer made her shudder, so long as it did not touch her own person.
"You'd better go and chase yourself round the square a few times," said she, turning away and taking up some mending.
"You see, there ain't no way out of it," pursued he, with an insinuating grin.
Susan gave him a steady, straight look."Don't ever speak of it again," said she quietly."You ought to be ashamed--and you will be when you think it over."He laughed loudly."I've thought it over.I mean what I say.If you don't do the square thing by me, you drive me out."He came hulking up to her, tried to catch her in his big powerful arms.She put the table between him and her.He kicked it aside and came on.She saw that her move had given him a false impression--a notion that she was afraid of him, was coquetting with him.She opened the door leading into the front part of the flat where the Quinlan family lived."If you don't behave yourself, I'll call Mr.Quinlan," said she, not the least bluster or fear or nervousness in her tone.
"What'd be the use? He'd only laugh.Why, the same thing's going on in their family.""Still, he'd lynch you if I told him what _you_ were trying to do."Even Ashbel saw this familiar truth of human nature.The fact that Quinlan was guilty himself, far from staying him from meting out savage justice to another, would make him the more relentless and eager."All right," said he."Then you want me to git out?""I want you to behave yourself and stay on.Go take a walk, Ashbel."And Ashbel went.But his expression was not reassuring; Susan feared he had no intention of accepting his defeat.However, she reasoned that numbskull though he was, he yet had wit enough to realize how greatly to his disadvantage any change he could make would be.She did not speak of the matter to Etta, who was therefore taken completely by surprise when Ashbel, after a silent supper that evening, burst out with his grievance:
