"I should hate a welter of trivial responsibilities," she said decisively. "A great big house and a lot of servants to manage—to say nothing of a husband!—the mere prospect terrifies me." "Now I’m doubly sure that we’re birds of a feather, Janet! Still, aren’t you rather difficult to please? In Paris you said you wouldn’t marry a man if he was poor? Here you say you won’t marry a man if he’s rich." "Does it matter, Robert? What rich man is likely to ask me?" "You’re quite wrong. One is asking you now." "You!" Had he suddenly lost his senses? "I’ve inherited a couple of millions, Janet!" He briefly put her in possession of the facts. Then he made her a formal offer of marriage, in tones so restrained that she could hardly guess the immortal longing beneath them. "I need a partner to share the rich man’s burden!" he said, with a quizzical smile. "And I know from experience that you are the one partner in the world for me." "No!" she said, her eyes half closed, her cheeks rather pale. "I—I’m not sure that I’m ready for marriage." "Oh, don’t let that stop you! Nobody is ever ready for birth, marriage, or death. We’re just plunged in—doubts, hesitations, and all. You don’t suppose any sane man or woman _wants_ to take the plunge, do you? I know _I_ don’t. But since I’ve got to marry somebody, I’ve made up my mind to marry no one but you." "At least you’re quite frank," she said, with a rather trembling lip. "Are you angry? Heaven knows it would be easier for me to use the stock phrases on which we were brought up and fed up. But you’re a woman of the new age! And I’m proposing partnership to an equal, to a fellow worker—not to a goddess-drudge!" They both rose from the settee. "Surely," he said, wondering at her silence, "it isn’t the Free Love philosophy that’s in the way?" "No, no!" she said, emphatically. "I thought I’d told you that in Paris." She repeated that she was done with all that! She admitted that, for a time, Cornelia had won her over to what Bernard Shaw called the _Love-Is-All_ school of fanatics. And, so she feared, she had actually believed in her own readiness to give up _All for Love_! But the hard knocks of the last two years had opened her eyes to the inadequacy as well as to the inexpediency of this philosophy. When the Hutchins Burleys, the Cornelia Coverts, the women with horn-rimmed spectacles, and their like—when these successively popped up to interfere with her purposes, she had realized that love, far from being _all_ to her, was simply one of her heart’s desires. She still held to the view that the love relation between two people should be subject to no other law than that of their own consciences. And she still hoped that society would be converted to this view, although she no longer had a mind to risk her soul’s welfare in its behalf.