Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/322

 "To be wrong?"

"To be so frightfully sure you were right. I never saw another human so sure. How could you help it, with Queen Anne's war and John Adams' administration and Antietam forever in you? And you weren't so wrong at that."

Her thoughts were leaping with a restless clarity, swift even for her; she was sustained abnormally by nervous excitement, he realized, and when her hypertension snapped, she would collapse, he thought.

"You mean I was not so wrong about Ketlar?" he asked, stupidly, because of his thinking of her.

"Oh, no; you were wrong about Ket; but you certainly are right about the rest—Chicago and the law and civilization. I told you that evening—it was after the trial of that 'Garian person who'd burned up his store, remember?"

"I remember," said Calvin.

"You and I were in the court-room afterwards. You'd come after some papers."

"I came back to see if you had waited."

"Oh, did you? . . . I told you that I got your idea in the speech you made to the jury about Chicago and the State and the country. I thought I did get it; but I didn't. But I guess I have it now; if I haven't, I'm hopeless.

"You see," she resumed after a minute, "I'd only read in the papers about Baretta and Frankie Zenn and the hold-ups and shootings and bombings all over Chicago. They were just reading matter to me. They weren't to you; you knew; you knew," she repeated and he felt her shaking, "you knew they rode after people in cars and shot to kill—and nobody touched them. You couldn't touch them, for you couldn't find anybody who'd talk. So you got sort of crazy, inside you, to stop the murder-