For a wild moment I yielded to the suggestion ... if I could have him and my art ... but I hope I am not altogether a cad. I saw what all his efforts could not keep me from seeing, that even to do that for me, to get me into his place in Mexico and back again would be a tax on him, and to ask him to do it with a reservation in my mind would be more than I would stand for. "It isn't fair, Helmeth, my letting you think that anything could pull me away from the stage. It isn't that I don't agree with you about how a husband and wife ought to be with one another, nor that I am not entirely of the opinion that the atmosphere of the stage is not the place to bring up children the way you want yours brought up; it is because not even the kind of marriage you offer me would hold me." "You mean that you'd leave me? That you'd go back to it?" "Well, why not? I left my first husband. I know that wasn't the way it seemed to me then, but that's what it amounted to ... and he fell in love with the village dressmaker." I had never told him that part of my life; I had never thought of it in the terms in which I had just stated it, I saw him grow slowly white under the sun-brown of his skin. "I see ... if your only idea in staying with me is that I might----Good God, Olivia, do you know what you've said to me?" "Nothing except what is right for you to know. Do you remember, Helmeth, what I told you Mark Eversley called me?" "A Woman of Genius; I remember." He was looking at me now as though the phrase were a sort of acid test which brought out in me traits unsuspected before. "Well, then, I'm those two things, a woman and a genius, and the woman was meant for you; don't think I don't know that and am not proud of it with every fibre of my brain and body. I should have been glad once; if it were possible I'd be glad now to have kept your house and borne your children, and see to it that they brushed their teeth and had hair ribbons to match their clothes." "Their mother thought that was important." He snatched at this as at an incontestable evidence of my being all that I was trying to show him that I was not. "It _is_ important.... I remember to this day the effect on me of my hair ribbons----" He broke in eagerly. "If you can see that ... if you understand what their mother wanted ... things I missed out of my life through having no mother, that I've heard you say you missed partly out of yours ... birthdays and Christmas and good chances to marry when they grow up----"