Susan, suddenly weak, had seated herself again. From his first words she had been prey to an internal struggle--her heart fighting against understanding things about her relations with Rod, about his feeling toward her, which she had long been contriving to hide from herself. When Drumley began she knew that the end of self-deception was at hand--if she let him speak. But the instant he had spoken, the struggle ended. If he had tried to stop she would have compelled him to go on. "That woman is you," he continued in the same solemn measured way. "Rod will not marry you. He cannot leave you. And you are dragging him down. You are young. You don't know that passionate love is a man's worst enemy. It satisfies his ambition--why struggle when one already has attained the climax of desire? It saps his strength, takes from him the energy without which achievement is impossible. Passion dies poisoned of its own sweets. But passionate love kills--at least, it kills the man. If you did not love him, I'd not be talking to you now. But you do love him. So I say, you are killing him. . . . Don't think he has told me----" "I know he didn't," she interrupted curtly. "He does not whine." She hadn't a doubt of the truth of her loyal defense. And Drumley could not have raised a doubt, even if she had been seeing the expression of his face. His long practice of the modern editorial art of clearness and brevity and compact statement had enabled him to put into those few sentences more than another might have been unable to express in hours of explanation and appeal. And the ideas were not new to her. Rod had often talked them in a general way and she had thought much about them. Until now she had never seen how they applied to Rod and herself. But she was seeing and feeling it now so acutely that if she had tried to speak or to move she could not have done so. After a long pause, Drumley said: "Do you comprehend what I mean?" She was silent--so it was certain that she comprehended. "But you don't believe?. . . He began to borrow money almost immediately on his arrival here last summer. He has been borrowing ever since--from everybody and anybody. He owes now, as nearly as I can find out, upwards of three thousand dollars." Susan made a slight but sharp movement. "You don't believe me?" "Yes. Go on." "He has it in him, I'm confident, to write plays--strong plays. Does he ever write except ephemeral space stuff for the paper?" "No." "And he never will so long as he has you to go home to. He lives beyond his means because he will have you in comfortable surroundings and dressed to stimulate his passion. If he would marry you, it might be a little better--though still he would never amount to anything as long as his love lasted--the kind of love you inspire. But he will never marry you. I learned that from what I know of his ideas and from what I've observed as to your relations--not from anything he ever said about you."