Of course, she would be paying a tremendous price for all these worldly advantages. Mell was aware of that all the while, but after deducting from the gross weight of their true value the real or approximate weight of their possible evils and disadvantages, she would undoubtedly still be getting the best of a good bargain. What is life but an enigmatical offset of losses and gain--so much gain on the one hand, so much loss on the other? And what was this transaction between herself and Rube but a repetition, under a somewhat different formula, of those mathematical problems worked out on her slate at school? It was all very simple. Young woman, if you were in Mell's place; if you had six good reasons for not telling the man you are about to marry that you did not care a straw about him, wouldn't you hold your peace? Then cast no stones at Mell. Mell _was_ deeply moved by Rube's words, but not deep enough to damage her future prospects. And since a woman has very poor prospects outside of matrimony, ought we not to excuse her for attending closely to business? At all events, although Mell's thoughts were heavy, and her soul stirred within her, and her thick breathing almost stifled in a painful sense of guilt, she did not say a word. Feeling that Rube's eyes were fixed upon her, she raised to him her own, suffused in tears; an answer which fully satisfied her companion. From which it will appear that a woman may weep for the man she takes in--weep, and yet keep on taking him in. And what can a man do? How could Rube tell that it was the hidden pathos of his own groundless faith, and not a feeling of sympathetic affection, which brought such softness of expression into that girl's luminous orbs? If the actual is the only true thing, and amounts to everything, as it really does in the school of Realism, there is still one difficulty to be encountered--to get hold of the actual. He who aspires to find out the actual, where a woman is concerned, must get himself another kind of eye, one whose vision is introspective and able to penetrate into that mysterious element in a clever woman's nature which enables her so successfully to clothe the Not-True in the beautiful garments of Truth. Rube Rutland felt uncertain about a good many things--his own strength under temptation, his mother's consent to this marriage, Clara's temper, the great sea serpent, the Pope's infallibility, the man in the Iron Mask, and many a cock-and-bull story beside, but he never once doubted Mell Creecy's love, the purest myth among them all.