BLANCHE. And for me! I knew then for the first time you loved me, and that I loved you. Oh! how short life of a sudden seemed! Not half long enough for the happiness it held for me! [_She turns upon him with a vivid change of feeling._] Has it turned out so? STERLING. How different! Oh, what a beast! what a fool! BLANCHE. [_Speaking with pathetic emotion, tears in her throat and in her eyes._] And that early summer's day you asked me to be your wife! [_She gives a little exclamation, half a sob, half a laugh._] It was in the corner of the garden; I can smell the lilacs now! And the raindrops fell from the branches as my happy tears did on father's shoulder that night, when I said, "Father, he will make me the happiest woman in the world!" STERLING. O God! to have your love back! BLANCHE. You can't breathe life back into a dead thing; how different the world would be if one could! STERLING. You can bring back life to the drowned; perhaps your love is only drowned in the sorrow I've caused. BLANCHE. [_Smiles sadly and shakes her head; the smile dies away._] Life to me then was like a glorious staircase, and I mounted happy step after step led by your hand till everything _seemed_ to culminate on the day of our wedding. You men don't, _can't_ realize, what that service means to a girl. In those few moments she parts from all that have cherished her, made her life, and gives her whole self, her love, her body, and even her soul sometimes--for love often overwhelms us women--to _the_ man who, she believes, wants, _starves_, for her gifts. All that a woman who marries for love feels at the altar I tell you a _man_ can't understand! You treated this gift of mine, Dick, like a child does a Santa Claus plaything--for a while you were never happy away from it, then you grew accustomed to it, then you broke it, and now you have even lost the broken pieces! STERLING. [_Comes to her, growing more and more determined._] I will _find_ them, and put them together again. BLANCHE. [_Again smiles sadly and shakes her head._] First we made of _every Tuesday_ a festival--our wedding anniversary. After a while we kept the twenty-eighth of _every month_! The second year you were satisfied with the twenty-eighth of April only, and last year you forgot the day altogether. And yet what a happy first year it was! STERLING. Ah, you see I _did_ make you happy once!