“The trouble with you, Hugh, is that you still deceive yourself. You throw a glamour over things. You want to keep your cake and eat it too. “I don't see why you say that. And marriage especially--” She took me up. “Marriage! What other career is open to a woman? Unless she is married, and married well, according to the money standard you men have set up, she is nobody. We can't all be Florence Nightingales, and I am unable to imagine myself a Julia Ward Howe or a Harriet Beecher Stowe. What is left? Nothing but marriage. I'm hard and cynical, you will say, but I have thought, and I'm not afraid, as I have told you, to look things in the face. There are very few women, I think, who would not take the real thing if they had the chance before it were too late, who wouldn't be willing to do their own cooking in order to get it.” She fell silent suddenly. I began to pace the room. “For God's sake, don't do this, Nancy!” I begged. But she continued to stare into the fire, as though she had not heard me. “If you had made up your mind to do it, why did you tell me?” I asked. “Sentiment, I suppose. I am paying a tribute to what I once was, to what you once were,” she said. “A--a sort of good-bye to sentiment.” “Nancy!” I said hoarsely. She shook her head. “No, Hugh. Surely you can't misjudge me so!” she answered reproachfully. “Do you think I should have sent for you if I had meant--that!” “No, no, I didn't think so. But why not? You--you cared once, and you tell me plainly you don't love him. It was all a terrible mistake. We were meant for each other.” “I did love you then,” she said. “You never knew how much. And there is nothing I wouldn't give to bring it all back again. But I can't. It's gone. You're gone, and I'm gone. I mean what we were. Oh, why did you change?” “It was you who changed,” I declared, bewildered. “Couldn't you see--can't you see now what you did? But perhaps you couldn't help it. Perhaps it was just you, after all.” “What I did?” “Why couldn't you have held fast to your faith? If you had, you would have known what it was I adored in you. Oh, I don't mind telling you now, it was just that faith, Hugh, that faith you had in life, that faith you had in me. You weren't cynical and calculating, like Ralph Hambleton, you had imagination. I--I dreamed, too. And do you remember the time when you made the boat, and we went to Logan's Pond, and you sank in her?” “And you stayed,” I went on, “when all the others ran away? You ran down the hill like a whirlwind.” She laughed. “And then you came here one day, to a party, and said you were going to Harvard, and quarrelled with me.” “Why did you doubt met” I asked agitatedly. “Why didn't you let me see that you still cared?”