"You can talk beautifully, Gerald, that's one sure thing; but talk me over you can't. Seems to me I should have to be crazy to forget all in a moment what I've said over and over to myself, and drilled myself not to lose sight of. After you asked me the other day, though I knew it was just on the spur of the moment, I thought it all out in the night as much as if it had been serious, and I saw what would be the one safe course for little me. I mustn't; that's all there is to it. Everything is wrong for it to turn out happy in the end. I'm terribly fond of you, but I should be scared to death of you, simply scared to death, as a husband. We're not the same kind. If I could forget it on my own account, I have only to remember how it would strike Estelle. And Estelle's got no end of horse sense. It's according to horse sense we must act when it comes to settling the real things of life. I expect"--she had the effect of turning a page or a corner; she dropped from heights of argument to low plains--"I expect I shall be big as a mountain by and by. I don't see any help for it. I starve myself, I drink hot water, I take exercise,--nearly walk my legs off,--and the next time I get weighed I've gained three pounds! What's the use? Then, I'm older than you." "Not at all. I'm older than the everlasting hills; you are the youngest thing that lives." "That's all right, but you were twenty-eight your last birthday, and I'm thirty. I'm afraid my character's already pretty well fixed in its present form. When it comes over me, for instance, to play the clown, I've got to do it or burst. And you're naturally a tyrant, you know." "I am. I am critical, carping, conventional, and a tyrant, everything you say, but just because I am those things, you ought to be able to see, dear Aurora--because I am those things and know it, they are the things least to be feared in me. Do you suppose Marcus Aurelius was really calm and philosophical? Because he, on the contrary, was anxious and passionate, he wrote those maxims to try to live by. When you _would_ go and be a negress, did I make a scene? I gnashed my teeth and gnawed my knuckles, but when I saw you afterward, wasn't I decently decent?" "Yes, but you took to your bed. If I were Mrs. Gerald, and the Pope of Rome sent for me to do Lew Dockstader for him and his cardinals, you know you wouldn't let me go." "You are wrong. I should make a point of it. I should only ask to be permitted to retire into solitude until all the vulgar people had stopped talking about it."