"Then I will try it." The gray eyes grew stormy. "For if we are to continue as employer and secretary--and you must have such a person and I must earn my living--it would be much easier if you really understood and it was all settled. You've talked about early hardships, misunderstood childhood, goat tending, and what not; and the world gives you credit for your achievements. Then surely you must understand the woman's end of the game--the American woman's part in business, for it's not easy to be errand girl or to fill endless underpaid clerical positions. It's not easy to pile out every morning at such and such an hour and stand at a desk and work as if you had neither heart nor eye for the other things in life until gradually the woman part of yourself is changed and it is often too late to enjoy anything but desk drudgery--and a bonus! "Now the man in the business game forgoes nothing; he has the world's applause if he succeeds and the kisses of the woman he loves for his recreation, and all is complete and as it should be. But we commercial women of to-day do a man's work and earn a man's wage. We do stay starved women, even if that fact doesn't appear on the surface. We cannot have the things of romance as well as our livelihood. And by the very nature of the average business woman's life she is often in love with someone in her office--from propinquity if for no other reason. She must. Don't you see? They're practically the only men she really comes to know or who come to know her, and she just can't stab her heart into sudden death. "So she wears her prettiest frock for this man--a wooden-faced bookkeeper perhaps; or a preoccupied president--and she dreams of him and is jealous of him and very likely gossips about him. And the years pass and she stays just as shut away and misunderstood and starved. And sometimes a woman, originally the most honest in the world, under these circumstances will deliberately steal another woman's husband if she has the chance. Yes, she will--she does." "What do you mean, Mary?" He was almost unconscious of using the name. "That I am no different from the others. I came here with the same starved heart and woman's hopes, and I put into your career the devotion and service and very prayers that I should have put into a home and a family--your joys were my joys, your problems mine. It has not been my clever brain that has made me worth so much to you. That is what the superficial public says, but I know better. It's been the love--yes, the love for you that has made me indispensable! The unreturned and unsuspected and I presume wicked love I felt for you. And now I've told you--broken precedent and told the truth. And as you don't love me you'll feel very uncomfortable with me about. And you won't want to play off pal; you'll fight shy of me except for everyday work. So it has been the only square thing to do--humiliate myself into telling.