“What do you mean?” “I mean, what has seeing and feeling done to you? Has it made any permanent changes in you? Your experiences here have impressed you a great deal—but how long will the effect last when you get home?... When Paris is just a memory—and a subject for conversation? In ten years will you be any different as a result of all this than you would have been if you had never come?” He hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said, slowly. “What do _you_ think?” “I think,” she said, “that we will get back into the old environments and the old habits and will become just what we would have been. If we were to stay here, then we might change, broaden, really profit by our experiences. But we go home. We see the same faces, hear the same sort of talk, and are tied by the same sort of prejudices and theories and narrownesses that we used to accept without question. We will know better for a while, and then we will revert.... It takes something pretty big and startling to change a person forever.” “Big and startling.... You mean something in his own life and experience—something personal to him—that is big and startling?” “Yes.” “Like—” “Oh, like committing a crime, or making some supreme decision or sacrifice.... Anything that strains the very soul of a person so that it can never get back into its former shape.” “Love?” “Not love itself, but something wonderful or terrible that comes as the result of a love.” “Then you don’t think experiences change people, that it is—well, just making decisions that grow out of the experiences. It is reaching a crisis and then making a choice of which way you will go.” “I think that is it. I don’t see how any event can change a person if he remains merely a spectator. I don’t think any sort of happening will really alter a person for good and all unless it has compelled him to use every bit of his will and courage and intelligence to make up his mind what he will do about it. If he chooses the right way, then he becomes stronger; if he chooses the wrong way or dodges the decision, he becomes weaker.” “There’s no dodging the choice,” he said. “And that is what’s the matter with you, isn’t it?” “Yes.” “And the choice?” She knew very well what problem he was laboring over. “Is Andree,” he said. “She was bound to be the problem. Couldn’t you see that from the beginning?” “That doesn’t matter now—what I saw at the beginning. All that has happened has happened”—he paused and stared down at the table-cloth—“and I’m glad it did happen.... But now I’ve got to settle the bill.” “And you want my advice?” She looked at him queerly. “You have come to _me_ for advice about this?” “Not for advice. I just want to know what you think.” “About what—definitely?” “Whether I should marry Andree?” “Why shouldn’t you?”