“You may be right,” she said with a half smile that he could not interpret. “By all means let us talk it out!” Her serene glance was raised again; but it did not rest on Wilfred. She was looking at the kettle, meditatively. “If you do not love me, why do you want to marry me?” “I _do_ love you,” said Wilfred. “But not. . . .” “Not passionately,” she quickly interposed, smiling and looking at him full; an extraordinary look of remote kindness. Wilfred was silent. He was being put in the wrong, though he knew he was right. “Well, your reasons?” she asked. “You are the finest woman I know,” he said quickly. This was one of the questions he had imagined her asking. “I respect and admire you. My instinct tells me you will grow in my respect and admiration as long as I live. That’s the only thing that could hold me.” She smiled again. He felt resentfully, that she was reading him through and through. It wasn’t fair, because he was all at sea respecting her. Still, everything had to come out! “You feel that it is essential you should be held,” said Frances Mary, dryly. “Oh Fanny, you make me feel so young!” Again that smile from a distance. The kettle boiled; but instead of making tea, she put out the light. She looked about her. Fetching a little raffia basket, she commenced to sew a lace edging to a scrap of white stuff. “To live with somebody you trusted!” said Wilfred, moved by his own words. “Somebody you could be yourself with; to whom you could reveal your innermost thoughts! To share the same tastes and pleasures! Somebody who could help you, and whom you might help a little—you have said it of me. Wouldn’t that be happiness?” “You have pictured it all out!” she said smiling. “Yes, I have!” he returned, goaded. “I have thought about it, and dreamed about it! I know you laugh at my mixed mental processes, at the way I deceive myself; well, I laugh too! Just the same you can build on dreams as well as thoughts. The soft stuff fades; but something collects little by little, just from one’s having been deceived so often.” She disregarded this. “You do not know me,” she said quietly. “Nobody knows me. I have made a business of concealing myself. Even in my stories. Everything I write is just . . . bravura! . . . You only imagine those fine things about me. Nobody is any better than anybody else—in some ways. If you thought you were getting a paragon you’d be frightfully sold . . . so would I!” “Not a paragon,” said Wilfred, smiling in his turn. “I know your faults.” “What are they?” she challenged. “You are afraid of life. You hate your own emotions. You dissect them while they are alive. You are much too refined. Occasionally you ought to be beaten. You have lived too long in your mind; you ought to give your blood a chance!” “What makes you say that?” she demanded, startled and affronted. Wilfred shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “It just came out.”