"Here you are, two absolutely sound, strong, enduring specimens of humanity,—male and female,—loving each other, wanting each other,—and yet you say you can never be anything to each other! Hasn't nature anything to do with it? Are you going to sit there and tell me that for some obstinate, mawkish reason you think you ought to deprive her of the one man in all this world that she wants and must have? It doesn't matter what she did a couple of years ago. It doesn't matter that she was,—and still may be designing,—the fact remains that she is the woman you love and that you are her man. She married old Mr. Thorpe deliberately, I grant you. She doesn't deny it. She loved you when she did it. And you can't, to save your soul, hate her for it. You ought to do so, I admit. But you don't, and that solves the problem. You want her now even more than you did two years ago. You can't defy nature, old chap. You may defy convention, and honour, and even common decency, but you can't beat nature out of its due. Now, look me in the eye! Why can't you marry Anne and—be everything to her, instead of nothing, as you put it? Answer me!" "It is impossible," groaned Thorpe. "You cannot understand, Simmy." "Nothing is impossible," said Simmy, the optimist. "If you are afraid of what people will say about it, then all I have to say is that you are worse than a coward: you are a stupid ass. People talked themselves black in the face when she married your grandfather, and what good did it do them? Not a particle of good. They roasted her to a fare-you-well, and they called her a mean, avaricious, soulless woman, and still she survives. Everybody expects her to marry you. When she does it, everybody will smile and say 'I told you so,'—and sneer a little, perhaps,—but, hang it all, what difference should that make? This is a big world. It is busier than you think. It will barely take the time to sniff twice or maybe three times at you and Anne and then it will hustle along on the scent of something new. It's always smelling out things, but that's all it amounts to. It overlooks divorces, liaisons, murders,—everything, in fact, except disappointments. It never forgives the man or woman who disappoints it. Now, I know something else that's on your mind. You think that because you operated—fatally, we'll say,—on your grandfather, that that is an obstacle in the way of your marriage with Anne. Tommy-rot! I've heard of a hundred doctors who have married the widows of their patients, and their friends usually congratulate 'em, which goes to prove something, doesn't it? You are expected by ninety per cent. of the inhabitants of greater New York to marry Anne Tresslyn. They may have forgotten everything else, but that one thing they _do_ expect. They said it would happen and it must. They said it when Anne married your grandfather, they said it when he died and they say it now, even though their minds are filled with other things."