He had me puzzled for fair by then. I just listened. "Just now," he says, "I called you a miserable little creature. That was because you quite naturally mistook me for one of the wretched hunters whom women have been trying to evade since the beginning. Well, I was wrong to call you that. Instead, I applaud your magnificent ability to take care of yourself. I applaud even more in the incident--but I won't bother you with that." I kept trying to see what he meant. "Now you must," he said, "try to understand me. What I meant to say to you was that with the whole world to choose from, you are, in my opinion, quite wrong to settle down here to your farm and your Luke and the drudgery you say you loathe, without ever giving yourself a chance to choose at all. Perhaps you would come back and settle here because you wanted to.... I hope you would do that, under somewhat different conditions. But don't settle here because you're trapped and can't get out." "But I can't get out--" I was beginning, but he went on: "I know perfectly well that a great part of the world would think that I ought not to be talking to you like that. They would say that you are 'safe' here. That you and Luke would have a quiet, contented life. But I care nothing at all for such safety. I think that unreasonable contentment leads to various kinds of damnation. If you were an ordinary girl I should not be talking to you like this. I should not have the courage--yet; not while life treats women as it treats them now. But in spite of your vulgarity, you are a remarkable woman." "In spite of _what_?" I says. "I mean it," he says, "and you must let me tell you, because you seem to be, in all but one thing, a fine straightforward creature. But in the way you treat men, you _are_ vulgar, you know. Not hopelessly, just deplorably. Now tell me the truth. Why did you pretend to flirt with me? For that isn't your natural manner. You put it on. Why did you do that?" I could tell him that well enough. "Why," I says, "I guess it was the same as the singing. I wanted you to know I wasn't a stick. I wanted you to think I was lively and fun. It's the way the girls do. I can't do it as good as they do, I know that." "Promise me," he says, "that if ever you do get out, you'll be the fine and straightforward one--not the other one." "I shan't get out," I says. "I can't get out." "'I can't get out,'" he says over. "'I can't get out.' It's a great mistake. If you feel it in you to get out, then you'll get out. That's the answer." "I do," I says. "I always have. I wake up in the mornings...." I'll never know what it was that come over me. But all of a sudden, the me that laid awake nights and thought, and the me that had come out in the sun that morning was the only me I had, and it could talk.