"Oh, Helmeth!" I began to imagine a perversity in his avoidance of the main issue. "It isn't the girls--it isn't anything of yours, it is something of mine. It is my art you aren't willing for me to bring into the family with me." "It is because, then, I'm not accustomed to think of the stage as being the sort of thing that belongs in a family. I thought you agreed with me about that?" He had me there; if I had seen a way to separate all that I loved in my art, from all that was most objectionable in the practice of it, I should have married him and trusted to carrying my point afterward. I had a vision of Helmeth's girls overhearing Polatkin advising me about the fit of my corsets, and me calling him Poly. I came back on another path to my recently awakened resentment. "Just the same you ought to have told me. Mrs. Howard is Miss Stanley's sister, isn't she?" "They don't live together." He had answered my unspoken question, as though the ideas that were forming in my head had been in juxtaposition in his own before. "Miss Stanley and the young brother--you remember him at Cadenabbia?--live at the old place. She has been a mother to him." "Ah," I couldn't forbear to suggest, "and she's mothering your children now." "Good heavens, Olivia! you are not jealous, are you?" "Yes, I am," I told him. "I'm jealous of every minute you spend away from me. I'm jealous of the men you do business with, men who can talk with you, hear your voice. Oh, my dear, my dear----" I put my hands up to his shoulders and cried a little upon his breast; his arms were about me; for me all time and place dissolved only to keep them there. "Look here, Olivia, if you feel this way, let us go and be married to-day and then we can spend Sunday all together. I did not mean to urge you just now; things are pretty rough with me; it will be a year or two before I can straighten them out, but, after all, I guess our feelings count for something." "I couldn't," I protested, "you don't understand; there's Polatkin and Jerry; he has written this play for me, we are all tied up together; you know how it would be if any of your partners should withdraw." "A woman has no business to be tied up to any man but her husband--" he broke out, "think of any other man being able to tell my wife what she should or shouldn't do!" We went over that ground again until we ceased from sheer exhaustion. It came to this at last, that he proposed that I should marry him at once; I could go back to Mexico with him. I hadn't to begin rehearsals until September; we could have the summer together and then I could go back to my work until he could claim me.