"I meant so well," she said and caught herself back into silence again. He started at the thought, at a depth and meaning in her voice, turned his chair about to look at her, and discovered she was weeping and choking noiselessly. He stood up close to her, moving very slowly and silently, his eyes full of this new surmise, and now without word or gesture from her he knew his thought was right. "My dear," he whispered. She turned her face from him. "I meant so well," she sobbed. "My dear! I meant so well." Still with an averted face her arms came out to him in a desperate, unreasoning appeal for love. He took her and held her close to him. "Never mind, dear," he said. "Don't mind." Her passion now was unconstrained. "I thought--" he began, and left the thing unsaid. "But your work," she said; "your research?" "I must give up research," he said. "Oh, my dearest!" "I must give up research," he repeated. "I've been seeing it for days. Clearer and clearer. _This_ dear, just settles things. Even--as we were coming home in the train--I was making up my mind. At Vevey I was talking to Solomonson." "My dear," she whispered, clinging to him. "I talked to Solomonson. He had ideas--a proposal." "No," she said. "Yes," he said. "I've left the thing too long." He repeated. "I must give up research--for years. I ought to have done it long before." "I had meant so well," she said. "I meant to work. I meant to deny myself...." "I'm glad," he whispered. "Glad! Why should you weep?" It seemed nothing to him then, that so he should take a long farewell to the rare, sweet air of that wonderland his mind had loved so dearly. All he remembered was that Marjorie was very dear to him, very dear to him, and that all her being was now calling out for him and his strength. "I had thought anyhow of giving up research," he repeated. "This merely decides. It happens to decide. I love you, dear. I put my research at your feet. Gladly. This is the end, and I do not care, my dear, at all. I do not care at all--seeing I have you...." He stood beside her for a moment, and then sat down again, sideways, upon his chair. "It isn't you, my dear, or me," he said, "but life that beats us--that beautiful, irrational mother.... Life does not care for research or knowledge, but only for life. Oh! the world has to go on yet for tens of thousands of years before--before we are free for that. I've got to fight--as other men fight...." He thought in silence for a time, oddly regardless of her. "But if it was not you," he said, staring at the fireplace with knitted brows, "if I did not love you.... Thank God, I love you, dear! Thank God, our children are love children! I want to live--to my finger-tips, but if I didn't love you--oh! love you! then I think now--I'd be glad--I'd be glad, I think, to cheat life of her victory."