“I hardly know myself,” he confessed. “I know it’s all confused, and I ought to have got things out of the tangle before I spoke to you. But I thought you might have seen and so be able to help me out. No: that’s all right, Ada,” he went on as she glared at him indignantly. “I’m blaming no one but myself. It’s my responsibility. You don’t see it yet, and I must make you see.” “If a thing’s there, I can see it.” “Oh, it’s there,” he said. “We can both see that. It’s only the cure for it that isn’t plain.” “What’s there?” “The failure of our marriage, if I must put it into words.” “Failure! But we _are_ married. What do you mean?” What Ada meant was that the ring was on her finger and the marriage certificate in her desk. Failure in marriage, if it meant anything to her, meant failure to get married, a broken engagement, and since their engagement had not been broken, since they had been formally and legally married in church, there could be no failure. “We didn’t exult in marriage,” he tried. “Exult? I’m sure I was the proudest woman in the parish the day I married you.” It was true. “But afterwards, afterwards!” “Oh,” she cried, “are you throwing it in my teeth that I didn’t have a baby? Was that my fault?” “No, no. But it might have saved us, all the same, and when the baby did not come we made no effort to save ourselves. There’s a light somewhere in every one of us and you and I have quenched our lights. They may be small, they may not be a great light like your father’s, or... or the light which I have seen in the country, they may be nothing but a feeble glow, and we can only give our best. You and I have not given ours. We have not tried to find our light, but now--now that we have discovered what has been wrong with us all this while--we can try, and together. We can all of us give something to the world, not children in our case, but the something else which we were made to give. We don’t know what it is that you can give and I can give, and we’ve left it late to begin to find out, but it is not too late, is it, Ada? Ada,” he pleaded, “it is not too late?” She looked at the clock. “If you want to wash your hands before dinner you’d better do it now,” she said, “or you will be late.” She rose, but before she left him, she had a moment of illumination. She thought she saw what he was driving at, that he must have seen some happy family while he was away and came back with the cry of the child less man on his lips. “I suppose this means,” she said, “that you want me to adopt a child. That’s what you mean by giving. Well, I won’t do it, Sam. I’ve something else to do with my time than to look after another woman’s brat.” “What have you to do?” he asked. “What is it that you want to do?” “To eat my dinner,” she said. She had a healthy appetite. Perhaps that was why she wanted nothing else.