I wish I was convincing you; but I never did. You didn't understand why I married him, why in face of everything I behaved pretty well to him, why his death left everything blank to me. Nobody quite understood, except old Aunt Maria who just quietly died as soon as he was gone. And you'll understand me no better now. I resent the way the world forgets him. There seems nothing of him left. My little girl is all Gaston; she lives with Gastons, she has the Gaston face and the Gaston ways. She's not a bit Quisante; she's nothing of him, nothing that he has left behind. If we'd had a son, a boy like him, I might feel differently. But, as it is, what's left? Only me. I am left, and I am not altogether a Gaston now, though it's the Gaston and nothing else that you like. No, I'm not all Gaston now. I've become Quisante in part--not in every way, or I shouldn't have felt as I did when I found the Professor's report. But he has laid hold of me, and he doesn't let go. I can't help thinking that he needn't have died except on my account. You feel sore that I don't love you, not as you want me to. He was sore too because I didn't love him; and since he couldn't make me love him, he had to make me wonder at him; he was doing that when he died. So I feel that I can't do anything to blot him out, and that I must stay Quisante, somebody bearing his name, representing him, keeping him in a way alive, being still his and not anybody else's.