Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/73

 soul and saw himself as he was, and—he swore.

“Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones,” he said aloud, “you’re a darned coward! Worse than that, you’re an unthinkable cad. That girl was kind to you. She treated you with the tender solicitude of a mother. And how have you returned her kindness? By looking down upon her with arrogant condescension. By pitying her.

“Pitying her! You—you miserable weakling—ingrate, pitying that fine, intelligent, generous girl. You, with your pitiful little store of secondhand knowledge, pitying that girl’s ignorance. Why, she’s forgotten more real things than you ever heard of, you—you—” Words utterly failed him.

Waldo’s awakening was thorough—painfully thorough. It left no tiny hidden recess of his contemptible little soul unrevealed from his searching self-analysis. Looking back over the twenty-one years of his uneventful life, he failed to resurrect but a single act of which he might now be proud, and that, strange to say, in the light of his past training, had to do neither with culture, intellect, birth, breeding, nor knowledge.

It was a purely gross, physical act. It was hideously, violently, repulsively animal—it was no other than the instant of heroism in which he had turned back upon the cliff’s face to battle with the