"To hesitate over a proposal is to refuse," said he with gentle raillery. "A man is a fool who does not understand and sheer off when a woman asks for time."
"You know that I love you," she cried.
"I also know that you love something else more. But it"s finished.
Let"s talk about something else."
"Won"t you let me tell you why I hesitate?" begged she.
"It doesn"t matter."
"But it does. Yes, I do refuse, Donald. I"ll never marry you until I am independent. You said a while ago that what I"ve been through had made a woman of me. Not yet. I"m only beginning. I"m still weak--still a coward. Donald, I must and will be free."
He looked full at her, with a strange smile in his brilliant eyes. Said he, with obvious intent to change the subject: "Mrs. Brindley"s very unhappy that you haven"t been to see her."
"When you asked me to marry you, the only reason I almost accepted was because I want someone to support me. I love you--yes. But it is as one loves before one has given oneself and has lived the same life with another. In the ordinary sense, it"s love that I feel. But--do you understand me, dearest?--in another sense, it"s only the hope of love, the belief that love will come."
He stopped short and looked at her, his eyes alive with the stimulus of a new and startling idea.
"If you and I had been everything to each other, and you were saying "Let us go on living the one life" and I were hesitating, then you"d be right. And I couldn"t hesitate, Donald. If you were mine, nothing could make me give you up, but when it"s only the hope of having you, then pride and self-respect have a chance to be heard."
He was ready to move on. "There"s something in that," said he, lapsed into his usual seeming of impa.s.siveness. "But not much."
"I never before knew you to fail to understand."
"I understand perfectly. You care, but you don"t care enough to suit me. I haven"t waited all these years before giving a woman my love, to be content with a love seated quietly and demurely between pride and self-respect."
"You wouldn"t marry me until I had failed," said she shrewdly. "Now you attack me for refusing to marry you until I"ve succeeded."
A slight shrug. "Proposal withdrawn," said he. "Now let"s talk about your career, your plans."
"I"m beginning to understand myself a little," said she. "I suppose you think that sort of personal talk is very silly and vain--and trivial."
"On the contrary," replied he, "it isn"t absolutely necessary to understand oneself. One is swept on in the same general direction, anyhow. But understanding helps one to go faster and steadier."
"It began, away back, when I was a girl--this idea of a career. I envied men and despised women, the sort of women I knew and met with. I didn"t realize why, then. But it was because a man had a chance to be somebody in himself and to do something, while a woman was just a--a more or less ornamental belonging of some man"s--what you want me to become now."
"As far as possible from my idea."
"Don"t you want me to belong to you?"
"As I belong to you."
"That sounds well, but it isn"t what could happen. The fact is, Donald, that I want to belong to you--want to be owned by you and to lose myself in you. And it"s that I"m fighting."
She felt the look he was bending upon her, and glowed and colored under it, but did not dare to turn her eyes to meet it. Said he: "Why fight it? Why not be happy?"
"Ah, but that"s just it," cried she. "I shouldn"t be happy. And I should make you miserable. The idea of a career--the idea that"s rooted deep in me and can"t ever be got out, Donald; it would torment me. You couldn"t kill it, no matter how much you loved me. I"d yield for the time. Then, I"d go back--or, if I didn"t, I"d be wretched and make you wish you"d never seen me."
"I understand," said he. "I don"t believe it, but I understand."
"You think I"m deceiving myself, because you saw me wasting my life, playing the idler and the fool, pretending I was working toward a career when I was really making myself fit for nothing but to be Stanley Baird"s mistress."
"And you"re still deceiving yourself. You won"t see the truth."
"No matter," said she. "I must go on and make a career--some kind of a career."
"At what?"
"At grand opera."
"How"ll you get the money?"
"Of Stanley, if necessary. That"s why I asked his address. I shan"t ask for much. He"ll not refuse."
"A few minutes ago you were talking of self-respect."
"As something I hoped to get. It comes with independence. I"ll pay any price to get it."
"Any price?" said he, and never before had she seen his self-control in danger.
"I shan"t ask Stanley until my other plans have failed."
"What other plans?"
"I am going to ask Mrs. Belloc for the money. She could afford to give--to lend--the little I"d want. I"m going to ask her in such a way that it will be as hard as possible for her to refuse. That isn"t ladylike, but--I"ve dropped out of the lady cla.s.s."
"And if she refuses?"
"Then I"ll go one after another to several very rich men I know, and ask them as a business proposition."
"Go in person," advised he with an undisguised sneer.
"I"ll raise no false hopes in them," she said. "If they choose to delude themselves, I"ll not go out of my way to undeceive them--until I have to."
"So THIS is Mildred Gower?"
"You made that remark before."
"Really?"
"When Stanley showed you a certain photograph of me."
"I remember. This is the same woman."
"It"s me," laughed she. "The real me. You"d not care to be married to her?"
"No," said he. Then, after a brief silence: "Yet, curiously, it was that woman with whom I fell in love. No, not exactly in love, for I"ve been thinking about what you said as to the difference between love in posse and love in esse, to put it scientifically--between love as a prospect and love as a reality."