In those first days, I had sometimes dreamed of his saying that--dreamed it hopelessly; but sometimes, too, I had sunk warm in the thought of it, as if there all thought had come home. Yet now, when he actually said it, it came to me with a great shock. And out of the fulness of what I suddenly read in my heart, I answered him: "Why, I can't marry you," I said. "I can't give up my work with you!" He looked down at me gravely, and he made me the answer of all men. "Give up the work! But the work together is one of the reasons why I love you." "I can see that," I said. "And the work together is one of the reasons I love you. But----" He put out his arms then, and took me. "You said you loved me!" he said. "I do," I said, "why of course I do----" And when he kissed me it was as if nothing new had happened, but only something which was already ours. "Then what is it," he asked, "but you for me, and me for you?" And I cried, "Oh, don't you see? That after being what I've been to you--knowing your work and your thought--I can't stop it and be just your wife? I can't exchange this for looking after your house and ordering your food, and sending off the laundry and keeping your clothes mended?" "But, my child----" he began. "I know what you mean," I told him, "you think it wouldn't be that way. You think we'd go on as we are. We wouldn't--we wouldn't. All those things have to be done--I'd be the one to do them. It would be I who would begin to play myself false, I who would begin to do all the little housewifely things that other women do. It would get me--it would eat up my time and my real work with you--I tell you it would get me in the end! It gets every woman!" "Well," he said again, "what then?" I saw his eyes, understanding, humorous, tender. "Don't!" I cried; "it's almost got me now--when you look at me like that." "Well," he said again, "what then?" "Oh, don't you see?" I cried, "I've got myself to fight. I care now for big issues--for life and death and the workers--for the future more than for now. We are working for them--you and I. I will not let myself care only for getting your food and keeping the house tidy!" He looked away over the fields, and by his eyes I thought that now I had lost him for good and all. But he only said: "To think what we have done to love--all of us. Of course I know that the possibility is exactly what you say it is." "Not the possibility," I said, "the inevitability. Look at all of them down there--Mother, Lena, Luke's mother, every woman in Katytown--and most of them everywhere else. They're all prostituted to housework. Don't let me do it! You've saved me this far--you've helped me to be the little that I've made of myself. Now help me! And," I added, "you'll _have_ to help me. For I want to do it!" He put out his hand, not like a lover, but like a comrade. And when I gave him mine, he shook it, like a friend.