"And you say you love him. You can't love both of us." "But I can. I do. I do love both of you.--Oh, I am straight. I shall be straight. I must work this out. I thought you might help me. That is why I came to you this morning. There must be some solution." She looked at him appealingly as he answered, "It is one or the other, Evan or me. I cannot imagine any other solution." "That's what he says. But I can't bring myself to it. He was for coming straight to you. I would not permit him. He has wanted to go, but I held him here, hard as it was on both of you, in order to have you together, to compare you two, to weigh you in my heart. And I get nowhere. I want you both. I can't give either of you up." "Unfortunately, as you see," Dick began, a slight twinkle in his eyes, "while you may be polyandrously inclined, we stupid male men cannot reconcile ourselves to such a situation." "Don't be cruel, Dick," she protested. "Forgive me. It was not so meant. It was out of my own hurt--an effort to bear it with philosophical complacence." "I have told him that he was the only man I had ever met who is as great as my husband, and that my husband is greater." "That was loyalty to me, yes, and loyalty to yourself," Dick explained. "You were mine until I ceased being the greatest man in the world. He then became the greatest man in the world." She shook her head. "Let me try to solve it for you," he continued. "You don't know your mind, your desire. You can't decide between us because you equally want us both?" "Yes," she whispered. "Only, rather, differently want you both." "Then the thing is settled," he concluded shortly. "What do you mean?" "This, Paula. I lose. Graham is the winner. Don't you see. Here am I, even with him, even and no more, while my advantage over him is our dozen years together--the dozen years of past love, the ties and bonds of heart and memory. Heavens! If all this weight were thrown in the balance on Evan's side, you wouldn't hesitate an instant in your decision. It is the first time you have ever been bowled over in your life, and the experience, coming so late, makes it hard for you to realize." "But, Dick, you bowled me over." He shook his head. "I have always liked to think so, and sometimes I have believed--but never really. I never took you off your feet, not even in the very beginning, whirlwind as the affair was. You may have been glamoured. You were never mad as I was mad, never swept as I was swept. I loved you first--" "And you were a royal lover." "I loved you first, Paula, and, though you did respond, it was not in the same way. I never took you off your feet. It seems pretty clear that Evan has." "I wish I could be sure," she mused. "I have a feeling of being bowled over, and yet I hesitate. The two are not compatible. Perhaps I never shall be bowled over by any man. And you don't seem to help me in the least." "You, and you alone, can solve it, Paula," he said gravely.