"Yes--anything rather than that. I daresay it is my fault, and I am quite willing to bear all the blame, but if we are together in the same room much longer we shall do something which we shall regret--at least I shall. I am sure of it." "That would be very unfortunate," said Darche, rising, with a short laugh. "Our life has been so exceptionally peaceful since we were married!" "I think it has," answered Marion, calmly, "considering your character and mine. On the whole we have kept the peace very well. It has certainly not been what I expected and hoped that it might be, but it has not been so unhappy as that of many people I know. We both made a mistake, perhaps, but others have made worse ones. You ask why I married you. I believe that I loved you. But I might ask you the same question." "You would get very much the same answer." "Oh no--you never loved me. I cannot even say that you have changed much in five years, since our honeymoon. You did not encourage my illusions very long." "No. Why should I?" "I daresay you were right. I daresay that it has been best so. The longer one has loved a thing, the harder it is to part from it. I loved my illusions. As for you--" "As for me, I loved you, as I understand love," said Darche walking up and down the room with his hands in his pockets. "And, what is more, as I understand love, I love you still." "Love cannot be a very serious matter with you, then," answered Marion, turning from him to the fire and pushing back a great log with her foot. "You are mistaken," returned Darche. "Love is a serious matter, but not half so serious as young girls are inclined to believe. Is it not a matter of prime importance to select carefully the woman who is to sit opposite to one at table for a lifetime, and whose voice one must hear every day for forty years or so? Of course it is serious. It is like selecting the president of a company--only that you cannot turn him out and choose another when you are not pleased with him. Love is not a wild, insane longing to be impossibly dramatic at every hour of the day. Love is natural selection. Darwin says so. Now a sensible man of business like me, naturally selects a sensible woman like you to be the mistress of his household. That is all it comes to, in the end. There is no essential difference between a man's feeling for the woman he loves and his feeling for anything else he wants." "And I fill the situation admirably. Is that what you mean?" inquired Marion with some scorn. "If you choose to put it in that way." "And that is what you call being loved?" "Yes--being wanted. It comes to that. All the rest is illusion--dream-stuff, humbug, 'fake' if you do not object to Bowery slang." "Are you going out?" asked Mrs. Darche, losing patience altogether. "No. But I am going upstairs to see the old gentleman. It is almost the same." He went towards the door and his hand was on the handle of the lock when she called him back.