"I love you, Roger, but I should like to be sincere. From my childhood I have lived alone a good deal and enjoyed a great deal of freedom. My father left in me a spirit of independence, which I haven't abused, because it seemed quite natural to me, and because it was wholesome. So I have acquired certain habits of mind that I should find difficult, now, to do without. I know that I am rather different from the majority of young girls of my class. Yet I believe that what I feel they feel too; only I dare to say it, and I have a clearer conscience. You ask me to unite my life with yours. It is my wish. For each of us it is our most profound desire to find our beloved mate. And it seems to me that you could be that mate, Roger . . . if . . . if you wished . . ." "If I wished!" he exclaimed. "That's a good joke! I don't do anything but wish! . . ." "If you _truly_ wished to be my mate. It is not a joke. Reflect! . . . To unite our lives means to suppress either one or the other. . . . What do you offer me? . . . You aren't aware of it, because the world has long been used to these inequalities. But they are new to me. . . . You do not come to me with only your affection. You come to me with your family, your friends, your clients, and your relatives, with your course mapped out, your career fixed, with your party and its dogmas, your family and its traditions,--with a whole world that is yours, a whole world that is you. And I, who have a world too, who am also a world,--you say to me: 'Abandon your world! Throw it away, and enter into mine!' I am ready to come, Roger, but I must come whole. Do you accept me as I am?" "I want all," said he. "It was you, just now, who said that you could not give me all." "You don't understand. I say: 'Do you accept me free? And do you accept all of me?'" "Free?" responded Roger circumspectly. "Everybody has been free in France since '89. . . ." (Annette smiled: "The old platitude! . . .") "But, after all, we must understand each other. It is certainly evident that from the moment you marry you will not be completely free. By that act you will have contracted obligations." "I don't like that word very much," said Annette, "but I am not afraid of the thing. I should joyously and freely take my part in the trials and labors of the man I loved, in the duties of our common life. But I won't renounce, on that account, the duties of my own life." "And what other duties are there? After what you have told me and what I think I know, your life, my dear Annette, your life that until now has been so placid and so calm, does not seem to me to have experienced any very great exigencies? What could it demand? Is it your work that you mean? Would you like to go on with it? I confess that kind of activity seems wrong to me, for a woman. At least, as a vocation. It's bothersome, in the home. . . . But I can't believe that you are afflicted with this gift from Heaven. You are too human, and too well balanced."