"I don't like your kind of life. I mean the kind the people you know lead. When I used to visit Geraldine French I was always finding points of likeness in it to my early training. We had to do so many things we didn't want to, just because other people did them. Everything was cut according to a pattern. I don't like rules and regulations. I like Yorkburg. Here love counts." "Love counts everywhere. Unfortunately, it's the rules and regulations that don't count in many worlds. Custom controls, I admit. But it's because love counts I need you, Mary. All of us get tired of it, the cap and bells, the sham and show, and underneath we know are eternal verities we pretend to forget. Eternal verities don't let you forget. Don't you see what you have done? You have made me understand what life could mean. In what you call my world are many who do not seem to know. There is something very terribly needing to be done there." "What is there needing to be done?" "To marry for love-- Oh, I don't mean there is no marrying for love." He laughed in the shocked, wide-opened eyes. "I mean there is nothing so deceptive as love's counterfeit, and other considerations masquerade under it unguessed, perhaps. Many men and women are, doubtless, honest in thinking when they marry that they love each other, but if they live long enough a large proportion find out their mistake." "Oh no! I don't believe it! I know too many happy marriages to believe a thing like that. The trouble is--" He looked in the protesting eyes. "The trouble is what?" "That people imagine what they start with will last through life. As if love alone stood still, did not grow more or become less. I do not wonder at the unhappy marriages. I wonder there are not more of them." "More of them? Were I to count the enviably happy couples I know there would barely be a dozen." "A dozen?" She turned toward him in pretended unbelief. "In you world, do you know a dozen?" "In you world, do you know more?" "Many more." "Could you name them? Not the outwardly, the seemingly happy ones, but those who are happier with each other under any circumstances than they would be apart under any conditions. Do you know many married people who come under this head?" For a moment she did not answer, then turned to him questioning, troubled eyes. "Why do you ask such things, John? Our ideals of happiness may not be those of others. I know many happily married people. I've always believed in love, am always going to believe in it, and if unhappiness follows many marriages it is because there is not love enough. Happiness is such a tender thing!" She drew her hands away and clasped them tightly. "One should so carefully guard it, and instead--" His eyes were missing no throb of the heart that sent recurring waves of color to her quivering face. "Instead?" "It is taken as a right, rather than an award. And then there is weeping or storming or sneering when it is lost."