Again she answered, "It is impossible. Do you not see that it is impossible? Starting forth on a new career, it would be insane for you to burden yourself with a wife. As for me, I am no more fit to marry a poor man than to be a housemaid. Victor, it is hopeless. For Heaven's sake, let us talk of it no longer! The only thing we can do is to forget that we have ever talked of it at all." "Will that be easy for you? I confess that nothing on earth could be harder for me." "No, it will not be easy, but I shall try with all my strength to do it. God only knows," putting her hand suddenly to her face, "how I shall live if I am _not_ able to do it." Then passionately, "Why did you speak? Why did you make the misery greater by dragging it to the light, so that we could face it, talk of it, discuss it? Oh why did you do it?" "Because I wanted to see if you were not made of braver stuff than other women," said he almost sternly. "In my maddest hours I never dreamed of speaking, until--what you said last night. Thinking of that after I came home, I resolved to give you one opportunity to break through the artificial trammels of your life, and find the freedom you professed to desire. It was better to do this, I thought, than to be tormented all my life by a regret, a doubt, lest I had lost happiness where one bold stroke might have gained it." "And now that you have found that I am _not_ brave, that I am like all the other conventional women of my class, are you not sorry that you have inflicted useless pain upon yourself?" "Of myself I do not think at all, and even when I think of you I cannot regret having spoken. Let the misery be what it will, it is something to have faced it together--it is everything to know that you love me, though you refuse to share my life." "You must not say that," said she, starting and shrinking as if from a blow. "How can I venture to acknowledge that I love you when I am going to marry Marston Brent?" "_Are_ you going to marry him?" "Have I not told you so?" He turned from her and took one short, quick turn across the square. Like every man in his position, he felt outraged and indignant, without pausing to consider how infinitely more inexorable the laws of society are with regard to women than to men. _He_ could put Mrs. Lancaster's fortune aside and go his way--to Egypt or to the dogs--without anybody crying out against his criminal folly, his criminal disregard of the duties and traditions of his class. But if Eleanor Milbourne put Marston Brent's princely fortune aside and disappointed all her friends, what remained to her but the bitter condemnation of those friends in particular and of society in general? When he came back she rose to meet him, making a picture worth remembering as she stood in her graceful youth and picturesque habit by the broken fountain, with the sombre cedar hedge behind and the intense azure of the summer sky above.