"You're making it very hard. It's true that she--my wife--has been unfaithful. But that was after we had been long separated in everything but the formalities, and morally I was in no position to blame her." "You'd been untrue to her?" "Yes." "With another woman. Were you _very_ much in love with her, Cary, the other woman?" she asked wistfully. For a moment he hesitated, too long a moment, for a flash of hateful intuition shot through Pat's quick brain. "There was _more_ than one. There may have been a dozen. Oh, I think you're _revolting_!" "I'm not going to lie to you, Pat. I regarded myself as free of all responsibility to her----" "You're free of all responsibility to me," she choked. "Don't think that I want----" "No. I am bound to you by the strongest tie I have ever known. I love you." "You've loved a hundred other women," charged Pat, savagely revelling in her exaggeration. "I've loved no one as I love you." Despite the banality of the words there was in his speech a quiet force that calmed and convinced her. "Not so that I ever wished to be free and marry." "Of course," she said loftily, "there's no reason why I should be jealous of your past." "It is your future that I have been jealous of always," he replied. "That is a thousand times harder to bear. And now I am asking you to give it to me." "You'd do a dishonourable thing, a thing you consider dishonourable, to be free?" she asked. "To marry you," he said doggedly. "Yes. There's nothing I'd stop at." She gave her little, delighted crow. "I believe you wouldn't. But I'm not going to let you." "You can't prevent me." "I wouldn't marry you if you did." His brows took on their ironic lift. "That is heroics, Pat; motion picture heroics. 'To save the other woman.'" Pat pouted. "It's misplaced nobility, my dear. She isn't entitled to it. She doesn't care for me. You do." "Not enough to marry you, though. Not enough to be _sure_. It's all so puzzling, Cary." Her deep, soft voice shook. "I--I don't understand myself. But I'm just not sure. Is that terrible of me, dear, not to want to marry you?" "Don't you love me, Pat?" he asked, incredulous of the doubt itself. "I suppose I do, now. If it would only last, like this." "But it can't go on like this," he cried hoarsely. "Why can't it?" she murmured protestingly. The eternal feminine within her, eternally static, eternally conservative, eternally fatalistic where its own interests are concerned, was asserting itself. Better the thing as it is, however precarious, than a step in the dark. Change, to a woman's apprehension, is a challenge to the unknown. "Surely you must know. Surely you must realize the constant risk, the constant danger----" "Of being found out? I'm not afraid for myself. You know, Cary, dear, I never can quite believe in danger until it comes. I suppose I ought to. I suppose I ought to feel different in lots of ways. Yet I don't feel different. Not really. Tell me why, Cary."