I want to think he
loves me. Oh! I want so to be able to love him; but how can I? I can't!
I can't!"
In the week in which they had been thrown together the girl
unconsciously had told Ford much about herself and her husband. What she
now told him was but an amplification of what he had guessed.
She had met Ashton a year and a half before, when she had just left
school at the convent and had returned to live with her family. Her home
was at Far Rockaway. Her father was a cashier in a bank at Long Island
City. One night, with a party of friends, she had been taken to a dance
at one of the beach hotels, and there met Ashton. At that time he was
one of a firm that was making book at the Aqueduct race-track. The girl
had met very few men and with them was shy and frightened, but with
Ashton she found herself at once at ease. That night he drove her and
her friends home in his touring-car and the next day they teased her
about her conquest. It made her very happy. After that she went to hops
at the hotel, and as the bookmaker did not dance, the two young people
sat upon the piazza. Then Ashton came to see her at her own house, but
when her father learned that the young man who had been calling upon her
was a bookmaker he told him he could not associate with his daughter.
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