She looked steadily back at him. "We haven't much time," she said, speaking with steady, calm conviction as though she had, for years, been expecting just such a conversation as this, and had thought out what she would say. "Aunt Elizabeth can come back earlier than she said. Perhaps I shall say something I oughtn't to. I don't care. The whole thing is that I love you. I suppose it's true that I don't know anything about men, but I'd be poor enough if my love for you just depended on your loving me back, and on your being good to me and all the rest of it. I've never had any one I could love until you came, but now that you have come it can't be anything that you can do that can alter it. If you were to go away I'd still love you, because it's the love in me that matters, not what I get for it. Perhaps you'll make me unhappy, but anyway one will be unhappy some of the time." She went up to him and kissed him. "I know Caroline Smith or some one would be very shocked if they thought I'd said such things to you, but I can't help what they say." He had a movement to catch her and hold her, but he kept himself off, moved away from her, turning his back to her. "You don't understand ... you don't understand," he repeated. "You know nothing about men, Maggie, and you know nothing about me. I tell you I wouldn't be faithful to you, and I'd be drunk sometimes, and I'd have moods for days, when I'd just sulk and not speak to a soul. I think those moods some damned sort of religion when I'm in them, but what they really are is bad temper. You've got to know it, Maggie. I'd be rotten to you, however much I wanted not to be." "That's my own affair," she answered. "I can look after myself. And for all the rest, I'm independent and I'll always be independent. I'll love you whether you're good to me or bad." "Well, then," he suddenly wheeled round to her, "you'd better have it ... I'm married already." She took that with a little startled cry. Her eyes searched his face in a puzzled fashion as though she were pursuing the truth. Then she said like a child who sees some toy broken before its eyes: "Oh, Martin!"