"No matter. You could be a good woman." Impulsively, "If you'll settle down and be a good woman, I'll marry you." Susan smiled gently. "And ruin your prospects?" "I don't care for prospects beside you. You _are_ a good woman--inside. The better I know you the less like a fast woman you are. Won't you go to work, Lorna, and wait for me?" Her smile had a little mockery in it now--perhaps to hide from him how deeply she was moved. "No matter what else I did, I'd not wait for you, Johnny. You'd never come. You're not a Johnny-on-the-spot." "You think I'm weak--don't you?" he said. Then, as she did not answer, "Well, I am. But I love you, all the same." For the first time he felt that he had touched her heart. The tears sprang to her eyes, which were not at all gray now but all violet, as was their wont when she was deeply moved. She laid her hands on his shoulders. "Oh, it's so good to be loved!" she murmured. He put his arms around her, and for the moment she rested there, content--yes, content, as many a woman who needed love less and craved it less has been content just with being loved, when to make herself content she has had to ignore and forget the personality of the man who was doing the loving--and the kind of love it was. Said he: "Don't you love me a little enough to be a good woman and wait till I set up in the law?" She let herself play with the idea, to prolong this novel feeling of content. She asked, "How long will that be?" "I'll be admitted in two years. I'll soon have a practice. My father's got influence." Susan looked at him sadly, slowly shook her head. "Two years--and then several years more. And I working in a factory--or behind a counter--from dawn till after dark--poor, hungry--half-naked--wearing my heart out--wearing my body away----" She drew away from him, laughed. "I was fooling, John--about marrying. I liked to hear you say those things. I couldn't marry you if I would. I'm married already." "_You_!" She nodded. "Tell me about it--won't you?" She looked at him in astonishment, so amazing seemed the idea that she could tell anyone that experience. It would be like voluntarily showing a hideous, repulsive scar or wound, for sometimes it was scar, and sometimes open wound, and always the thing that made whatever befell her endurable by comparison. She did not answer his appeal for her confidence but went on, "Anyhow, nothing could induce me to go to work again. You don't realize what work means--the only sort of work I can get to do. It's--it's selling both body and soul. I prefer----" He kissed her to stop her from finishing her sentence. "Don't--please," he pleaded. "You don't understand. In this life you'll soon grow hard and coarse and lose your beauty and your health--and become a moral and physical wreck."