“I’ve tried to tell you so a dozen times this week and failed. I was afraid, it meant so much to me. I had hoped to be with you another month at least in this beautiful world of sunlight and flowers, of moon and sea. I hoped to win you with a little more time and patience. But I couldn’t wait and see you go on this trip. I had to speak. I love you with the love a strong man can give but once in life. It’s strange that of all the women in the world I should have loved the one whose work I must oppose! You’ll believe me when I tell you that the fiercest battle I have ever fought was with the Devil when he whispered that I might win by hedging and trimming and lying diplomatically as men have done before and many men will do again. At least you respect me for the honesty with which I have met this issue?” He had asked her a direct question at last. Her silence had become unendurable. Her answer was scarcely audible. She only breathed it. “Yes, I understand and respect you for it--” His heart gave a throb of hope. “I don’t ask you if you love me now. I just want to know if I’ve a chance to win you?” The impulse to seize her hand was resistless. She made no effort to withdraw it and he pressed it tenderly. A wistful smile played about the sensitive mouth and she was slow to answer. “Tell me--have I a chance?” he pleaded. Her voice was far away but clear-toned music. He heard his doom in its perfect rhythm before the words were complete. “I can’t see,” she began slowly, “how two people could enter the sweet intimacy of marriage with a vital difference of opinion dividing them. I couldn’t. Your honesty and intellectual strength I admire. This honesty and strength will keep us opponents. Such an union is unthinkable--” “Not if we love one another,” he protested eagerly. “There is but one issue in human life between man and woman and that is love. If you love me, nothing else matters--” She shook her head. “It isn’t true. You love me--but other things matter. Otherwise you would give them up to win your love. I claim to be your equal in brain and heart if not in muscle. You say that if I love nothing else matters and yet you say in the same breath that you risk your love to save your principles. In your heart you know that other things do matter, and with me they matter deeply. I believe with every beat of my heart that the progress of the world waits on the advent of women in the organization of its industries, its politics and its thinking. This consciousness of her mission in the modern woman is the biggest fact of our century--” She paused and faced him with a look of iron purpose. “No matter if I did love you--I’d tear that love out of my heart if it held me back from the fulfilment of the highest ideal of duty to my sex--” “What higher ideal can any woman hold than her home?”