"No you don't. You didn't know when you married. You thought you were making a good match and your husband turned out to be a good-for-nothing rogue. I'm sorry to hurt you but you make me do it. If I'm wrong I'll have the satisfaction of knowing I went into it with my eyes open. I know all Jesse Dick's weaknesses and I love them. Five years from now he'll be a famous American poet--if not the most famous. I know just what he needs. He needs me, for one thing. In time he may go off with other women----" "Charley Kemp how can you sit there and talk like that!" "--but he'll come back to me. I know. I'll keep on with my job at Shields'. In two or three years I'll be making a very respectable number of thousands a year." "And in the meantime you'll live where, may I ask? Your father's in no position, goodness knows, to have a poet son-in-law dumped on his hands. Unless you're planning to live in the rear of the delicatessen, perhaps." "We've got a three-room cottage in Hubbard Woods. Some time, when you're feeling stronger, I'd like to have you see it. It belongs to Dorn, the landscape painter. He built it when Hubbard Woods was a wilderness. It's got a fireplace that doesn't draw and a sink that doesn't drain and windows that don't fit. It's right on the edge of the big ravine and the very thought of it makes me happy all over. And now I'm going to kiss you, grandma, which I think is awfully sweet of me, all things considered, you dear mistaken old-fashioned darling." Which she did, on the tip of Mrs. Payson's nose. At the word "old-fashioned" Mrs. Carrie Payson had bristled; then, inexplicably, had slumped without voicing a word in her own defense. She seemed momentarily uncertain, bewildered almost. Still, she did allow herself a last javelin. "'In five years he'll be a famous poet.' That's a sensible reason for marrying a man! Huh!" "But that's not my reason," Charley explained with charming good humour, "any more than because his hair is sort of red in lights, or his ears a little pointed, or his hands slim and brown or his ties always terrible." "What is your reason?" snapped Mrs. Payson. But an honest curiosity lighted her eye. "The same thing strikes us funny at the same time. We like the same kind of book though we may disagree about it. We like to be outdoors a lot, and we understand each other's language and we're not sentimental and we don't snarl if food is delayed and we don't demand explanations, and any one of those reasons would make marriage between two people a reasonably safe bet." Mrs. Payson forced herself to a tremendous effort. "You haven't even said you're----" she gulped--"you're----" with a rush--"in love with him." "I haven't said anything else." * * * * * But next June, when she was twenty, Charley was saying, "But a man who won't fight----!"