"But when you have a ready-made stock-market fortune handed to you, and a Gorgeous Girl wife, and the world comes to fawn upon you--you soon become intoxicated with a false sense of your own achievements and values. It does not last--nor does it pay. Such joy periods are merely recuperative periods. By and by something comes along and bumps into you and you are shoved out into the struggling seas--the learning and conquering game. It is not a sad state of affairs--but a mighty wise one. Then how can you, who have never earned, expect a joy to be yours forever?" "You have struggled and earned. You have the right to love me!" "Perhaps--but you cannot hide behind my skirts and claim the same right. I shall give you up. Why, this is no tragedy--it is the way many commercial nuns find their lives are cast. Commercial nuns, like their religious sisters, serve a novitiate--their vocation being tested out. We who find that the things of our fancy are husks leave them behind and go on in our abilities. We are needed women to-day; we must have recognition and respect. We possess a certain unwomanly honesty according to old standards, which makes us say such things as I have said to you. I love you, the ideal of you; yet I am hopeless to realize it. I refuse to keep on making my petty moan for sympathy when all the time the bigger part of me demands work and contentment--and things just like Gorgeous Girls." "But there must be a way out. I can't lose you. Do you know what it will mean?" "I fancy I do." The gray eyes were so maternal that Steve felt comforted. "Are you pushing me out of a stagnant joy pool?" he tried saying lightly. "Perhaps I'm heading that way when I stop serving you before all else." "Mary, Mary, quite contrary"--he gave her a gentle little shake--"say it all again. Then tell me if this is a mood and you'll change your mind and stay. You must stay--or else you don't love me." "Eternal masculine! That we love to be beaten, cry loudly, tell our neighbours, but we must prove our affections by crawling back to have you kiss the bruises." She shook her head. "You cannot believe that the world recognizes a difference between women with sentiments and sentimental women! Why, my boy, do you know that convictions, real convictions, do make a convict of a man, put a mental ball and chain on him which he can never deny? I have told you my convictions--I am convinced I should be doing wrong to both of us to stay. I shall go--and love my ideal and spend my salary in soothing things." "I'm not afraid of a divorce," he found himself insisting. "Nor I. But should you get one I would not marry you." "Not ever?" he asked. Unconsciously they both looked at the photograph of the Gorgeous Girl smiling down on them in serene and frivolous fashion. "Not ever," she told him, turning away.