FROM THE LIFE
you were related to me and they asked me to come up here and try to do something for your wife." He sat back with a contemptuous gesture of withdrawal from the discussion. "You tell me I'm a failure. You!"
Matt said, hoarsely: "You don't understand. She don't, either. I've been— All my life—" He looked down at his feet, clumsy in their "cow-hides." "The boy was an accident. It might have happened, anyway. A woman isn't responsible fer what she says like that."
It was as if he had found his tongue as clumsy as his feet, as fumbling as his hands, and struggled within himself, futilely, without expression, bewildered by this new and terrible view of himself as a criminal failure in life. He, who had always thought of himself as above his circumstances and better than his neighbors, as a thinker and a superior man!
He looked up at his brother pathetically. "I couldn't do the way you did. I couldn't go on workin' except I knew what I was workin' fer. I didn't want to live like a cow. I wanted to know what we were all livin' fer. I didn't want to make money just fer the sake o' makin' money, like you fellas in the city—"
"Look here," Ben said, fiercely, "I want you to understand that I went after money because I had brains enough to see that no one could live a healthy life without it. Poverty—it was poverty
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