"It was a wonderful time--my time of defiance--my time of surrender. At least I tried to make it surrender--and my greatest surrender was to consent not to go on defying. While I defied, I could surrender--because I could lose sight of everything in him. He was big enough, Austin! I seemed then to be putting the world--both worlds, if you like--quite out of sight, annihilating them for myself, saying I could get on without them if only I had Leonard--or, rather, if only Leonard would--would swallow me up!" She looked at me with one of her straight candid glances. "Well, he had no objection to that." Her lips curved in a reluctant smile. "You wouldn't expect him to have, would you? We made a plan. We were to go to Africa--somewhere in British East Africa--and live there--away from everything. Not because of fear or anything of that sort, you know--but because we felt we could get on better there. I wanted to strip myself of everything that made me distinct from him--of all I had or was, apart from him. I knew all the time that here, at home, we should be impossible together; you know I felt that because you watched the whole thing, Austin, and must have known that only that feeling could have kept me from him. Well, I could only try to drive out that fear of him by accepting all it meant--by being quite natural about it--by saying, 'I've an instinct that you'll absorb me; I yield to it--only make it easy--give it the best chance--don't keep me where all sorts of things compel me to struggle against it. Struggling isn't a possible life; perhaps surrender is. Let's try.' All this was the underlying thing--the real thing that was going on. On the top we were doing all sorts of interesting outside things--he was a wonderful companion--but this was what we were battling out all the time--how to make it work--how we could give our lives a chance of working together. We both wanted that--and we both knew that it was horribly difficult. The greatest thing about him is that he knew my side of the difficulty so extraordinarily well. Isn't that rather rare?" "To his mind you were a great woman. He called you so to me. That accounts for it." "How difficult it all is! The more the thing is worth while, the more difficult! Well, we were to try--to be married and go to Africa and try. Leonard didn't press marriage on me, but he admitted that he'd prefer it--for a particular reason that I'll tell you about presently. And I agreed; but neither of us made a great thing of that. Marriage may be a great thing, but I can't think that marrying just to mend matters is anything very great and sacred, can you? And that was all ours would have come to, of course. It would have been by way of apology." She had a remorseless mind--most remorseless for herself and her motives. Yet a man might be a bit puzzled how to meet her reasoning. "We're getting into the sphere of those opinions," I said. "We shall be up against Alison and Mrs. Jepps in a moment!"