"
By and by the Judge resumed: "It was a student's love affair, and
he would have married her. She said that if she married him, there
would never be any happiness for her in life; she was not in his
social class, and, moreover, their marriage would never be
understood as anything but a refuge from their shame, and neither
of them would be able to deny this. She disappeared sometime after
the birth of the child. More than a year later, maybe it was two
years, he received a letter from her stating that she was married
to a man in her own class and that her husband suspected nothing,
and that she expected to live a faithful wife to him and be the
mother of his children. The child had been adopted, the traces of
its parentage had been wiped out, those who had adopted it could do
more for its life and honor than he could. She begged him not to
try to find her or ruin her by communicating the past to her
husband. That's about all."
"The old tragedy--old except to them."
"Old enough. Were we not speaking the other day of how the old
tragedies are the new ones? I get something new out of this; you
get the old. What strikes me about it is that the man has declined
to shirk--that he has felt called upon not to injure any other life
by his silence. I wish I had a right to call it the mettle of a
young American, his truthfulness. As he put the case to me, what
he got out of it was this: Here was a girl deceiving her husband
about her past--otherwise he would never have married her.
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