Mary's voice had dropped low, and Hal thought how rich and warm it was when she was deeply moved. She went on: “I lived all me life in minin' camps, Joe Smith, and I seen men robbed and beaten, and women cryin' and childer hungry. I seen the company, like some great wicked beast that eat them up. But I never knew why, or what it meant—till that day, there at the Minettis'. I'd read about fine ladies in books, ye see; but I'd never been spoke to by one, I'd never had to swallow one, as ye might say. But there I did—and all at once I seemed to know where the money goes that's wrung out of the miners. I saw why people were robbin' us, grindin' the life out of us—for fine ladies like that, to keep them so shinin' and soft! 'Twould not have been so bad, if she'd not come just then, with all the men and boys dyin' down in the pits—dyin' for that soft, white skin, and those soft, white hands, and all those silky things she swished round in. My God, Joe—d'ye know what she seemed to me like? Like a smooth, sleek cat that has just eat up a whole nest full of baby mice, and has the blood of them all over her cheeks!”
Mary paused, breathing hard. Hal kept silence, and she went on again: “I had it out with meself, Joe! I don't want ye to think I'm any better than I am, and I asked meself this question—Is it for the men in the pits that ye hate her with such black murder? Or is it for the one man ye want, and that she's got? And I knew the answer to that! But then I asked meself another question, too—Would ye be like her if ye could? Would ye do what she's doin' right now—would ye have it on your soul? And as God hears me, Joe, 'tis the truth I speak—I'd not do it! No, not for the love of any man that ever walked on this earth!”
She had lifted her clenched fist as she spoke. She let it fall again, and strode on, not even glancing at him. “Ye might try a thousand years, Joe, and ye'd not realise the feelin's that come to me there at the Minettis'. The shame of it—not what she done to me, but what she made me in me own eyes! Me, the daughter of a drunken old miner, and her—I don't know what her father is, but she's some sort of princess, and she knows it. And that's the thing that counts, Joe! 'Tis not that she has so much money, and so many fine things; that she knows how to talk, and I don't, and that her voice is sweet, and mine is ugly, when I'm ragin' as I am now. No—'tis that she's so sure! That's the word I found to say it; she's sure—sure—sure! She has the fine things, she's always had them, she has a right to have them! And I have a right to nothin' but trouble, I'm hunted all day by misery and fear, I've lost even the roof over me head! Joe, ye know I've got some temper—I'm not easy to beat down; but when I'd got through bein' taught me place, I went off and hid meself, I ground me face in the dirt, for the black rage of it! I said to meself, 'Tis true! There's somethin' in her better than me! She's some kind of finer creature.—Look at these hands!” She held them out in the moonlight, with a swift, passionate gesture. “So she's a right to her man, and I'm a fool to have ever raised me eyes to him! I have to see............