He was still shaken from the illusion he had suffered, in high voltage. It suddenly occurred to him what it would mean if she had brought a story of an affair with a man—an affair that meant as much to her as Moira Kelvin meant to him. The very thought was torture. There is a touch of insanity in the best of men on this ground. Romney was amazed at his own feelings and at his own simplicity; and over all was a contaminating something that seemed to emerge from his deepest nature—a gladness for her primitive emotion regarding him where another woman was concerned. He wanted to take her close in his arms. An uncertain memory of the night before when he was half-asleep, recurred queerly.... He had not spoken, and yet he knew that in her case, he would want to ask and ask—also that to ask questions meant to bend a mighty pride. He was using his will to be fair—holding that woman is as free an instrument in the world as a man. "I love your truth," she said hoarsely. "I think that is all that saves it—saves me—the sense that what you say is true." "There is no more," he whispered. "I have told you all." "I love your truth—but I hate myself—" "Anna Erivan, you are superb to me. I think—there is a bit of madness or martyrdom about two coming together this way. I didn’t understand what my story could mean to you, until I thought of it the other way—as if you brought it to me—" "I have nothing interesting like that," she said with a smile. "I think if I brought you a story like that, it would change me in your eyes." "I would not let it," he said. "Your will could not save me," she answered. "A man might say and believe (until his own heart was touched) that a woman has all the rights of man to diffuse herself before her mate arrives, but in his own heart, he would see her differently if she did. Oh, it is not the pressure of centuries of man’s possession of women—not altogether his instinctive sense of conservation. That’s only physical. There is something back even of the patriarch idea about women. She cannot give herself to one and be the same again—not even in her own mind. There is something sacred about that, which men do not know—and which only great women know—" "Then you think a man big enough to place a woman on the same moral footing as himself has not come to the end of the subject?" "I think when men are tolerant enough for that, they will be great enough to accept woman’s idea of herself, which is greater still." "What is it—can you tell me?"