"I don't know, Olivia ... men, don't you know, not often ... but I want to marry you now. I want it greatly." I held him off still, trying to get my own experience in shape where I could leave it behind me. "Such affairs never turn out well, do they?" "Hardly ever, I believe." "Unless you turn them into marriage," I hazarded. "You know," he conjectured, "I've a notion that the kind of loving that goes to making such affairs, can't be turned into marriage very easily. It's a kind of subconscious knowledge of their unfitness that keeps us from turning them into marriage in the first place." "I wonder." He let me be for the moment revolving many things in my mind. "It wouldn't be the vision and the dream, Jerry. You and I----" "Well, what of it? It might be something better. Something neither of us ever had, really. It would be company." "No, I've never had it." I remembered how blank the issue of my work had been to Helmeth Garrett. "Well, then, ... we have years of work in us yet. I'll buy Polatkin out of the theatre." He was going off at a tangent of what we might do together, but I had thought of something more pertinent. "We might solve the problem of how to keep our art and still be happy." "We might." He was looking down on me with great content, but quite soberly. "Tell me, Olivia, suppose we shouldn't, even with the unhappiness, with all you have been through, would you rather be what you are, or like the others?" We were silent as we thought back across the years together; there was very little by this time that we did not know of one another. "No," I said at last, "if being different meant being like the others, I'd not choose to have it any different." THE END THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.