"Lilly, you're maddening! Lilly, can't you see what I haven't the words to tell you? For years--since that night at the Waldorf--I--I have been living for this moment. I realized it to-night as you read that play. Lilly, is what is between us insurmountable?" She jerked back her head, her irises at their trick of growing. "You don't know what you are saying!" "I do know what I am saying. I know that you are the most delectable woman in the world--and for me." She held out his hat and cane. "My little girl is asleep. Hadn't you better go?" "That's not fair," he said, taking the hat and cane, but flushing up furiously. "I know it isn't. But what is there I can say to you?" "You can talk it out. Man to man." "Sit down," she said, clasping her hands and regarding him through swimming and revealing eyes. "Now--what is there to say--Bruce--between you and me?" "Where is he?" "You know." "Are matters unchanged?" She nodded. "I love you, Lilly." "And I have a husband and a thirteen-year-old child, making of the triangle a rectangle." "You have held me off on that dagger point now for ten years. Good God! women don't martyrize themselves to a past these days. What are you doing with your life? Sacrificing it on the altar of the old burned-out husk of a marriage? Canonizing a mistake!" "It is the one thing I am able to do for him in some little reparation!" "Mock heroics." "No, it is more than mock heroic to save him that precious shred of his respectability. That is about all I have left him to cherish. There are some human beings you simply cannot conceive of in certain situations. Albert Penny and divorce are irreconcilable. Tear his heart out if you will, but hands off his respectability. It may sound absurd in the face of the enormity of what I have done to him, but it is a great solace to me to be able to sacrifice that much to him and to drag him through my life like a ball and chain. Somehow it seems that I ought to suffer that." "Stuff and nonsense! You made your mistake and you had the courage to tear away from it by the roots. Unless those roots have a drag?" "No. No drag! And yet I sometimes think my revolt has been a half madness. You cannot know the sheer folly, the crazy kind of tenacity that has driven me on through all these years! And for what? This mediocrity? Or is it that I am an instrument clearing the way for her? Zoe! Is there a divinity shapes our end, rough hew them how we will? Listen to something incredible. Do you know that Zoe's father doesn't know that he is a father?" "Good God!" "Yes, jealous truth going fiction one better." "You mean to say you have fought this out alone?" "He doesn't know. Neither do my parents. They would suck her down. Dwarf her with their terrible kind of love. She belongs to herself. She's a beautiful thing God has loaned me to rear into a rose, but the world is her garden in which to bloom and expand." "In all these years they don't know your whereabouts?"