"No, because you won't," answered Dinah. "I know you love me very dear, and I love you very dear; but marrying a woman don't turn a man's life upside down if he's a strong man and got his aims and objects and business. He goes on with his life, and the woman comes into it as an addition, and takes her place, and if all goes well, so much the better, and if all don't, then so much the worse for the woman--if the man's strong. A man's not going to let a woman bitch up his ways if he's strong. And you are strong, and no woman would spoil your show, because you wouldn't let her. But a woman's different. Marriage for her be the beginning of a new life. She can't take anything of the old life into it except her character and her religion. Marriage is being born again for a woman. I've thought of these things, Johnny." "Well, what about it? If you know so much, you ought to know more. Granted it don't always pan out well, and granted I'm a sort of man that wouldn't be turned to the right or left, are you a sort of woman that would be like to try and turn me? Are you masterful, or cranky, or jealous of your fancied rights? If you'd been such a she as that, should I have falled in love with you, or would you have falled in love with me? People fall in love with character quite as much as looks. And as we've grown up side by side, our characters were laid bare to each other from the time we could notice such things." She took him up eagerly. "Now that's the very matter in my mind. I've been getting to wonder. There's a lot in it, John. Do we know one another so well as we think we do? And isn't the very fact that we're grown up under the same roof a reason why we don't know each other so well as we might?" "You're always for turning a thing inside out, my words included. I say we must know each other as well as a man can know a girl, or a girl a man. We was little children together, when nothing was hidden between us, and grew up in perfect understanding which ripened at the appointed time into love--all natural and right and proper. Of course we know each other to the bottom of our natures; and so our marriage can't fail to be a good one. Any jolter-head would see that a man and a woman seldom come together on such a bed-rock of common sense and reason as us. And knowing all that, 'tis pure cussedness in you to argue different."