Seth found it necessary to stand up, to do this subject justice. “No!” he answered. “He doesn’t deserve such a wife. But because one man is incapable of appreciating a treasure which he has won, it’s no reason why another man shouldn’t--shouldn’t say to himself ‘I will either marry that kind of woman or I’ll marry none.’ Now, _is_ it, Isabel?” “Perhaps this wife is not altogether the treasure you think she is,” the young woman answered, with the indirection of her sex. Seth found words entirely inadequate to express his dissent. He could only smile at her, as if the doubt were too preposterous to be even suggested, and walk up and down in front of her. Still intent upon her work, and with her head inclined so that he saw only a softened angle of face beneath the crown of glowing light-hued hair, she made answer, speaking more slowly than was usual with her, and with frequent pauses: “I don’t think you know all my story, though it is a part of your family’s history on both sides. You remember my father--a sporting, horse-racing man of the world, and you know that my mother died when I was a baby. You knew me here, one summer, as a visiting cousin, and we played and quarrelled as children do. Now you know me again as your brother’s wife--but that is all. You know nothing of the rest--of how my father, proud about me as he was common in other things, kept me mewed up among governesses and housekeepers in one part of the house, while his flash companions rioted in another part; of how my wretched, chafing girlhood was spent among servants and tutors, with not so much as a glimpse of the world outside, like any Turkish girl; of how, when your brother, because he was a cousin, did become the one friend of my father’s who might be invited into the drawing room, and be introduced to me, and took a fancy that he would like to marry me, I welcomed even such a chance for emancipation, and almost cried for joy; and of how I woke up afterward--no, this is what you do not know.” There was a considerable pause here. “And I do not know why I tell this to you now, except that I want you to understand.” “I _do_ understand, Isabel.” As a matter of fact he did not understand at all, but he thought he did, which, for present purposes, came to the same thing. “And you can realize,” she went on, “how I feel at the thought of staying here the rest of my life--or, even if we go elsewhere--of having my life mapped out for me without any regard to my wishes and aspirations, while you are just pluming your wings for soaring, and can fly as high as you like with no one to gainsay you. Oh, what it must be to be a man!” She was looking up at him now, with enthusiasm supplanting the repining in her eyes. “And you love your work, so, too! You are so clever and capable! You can be anything you like in your profession--and it is impossible that I should ever be anything that I want to be.”