"But--I want to live myself! I don't want to wait. I want a great house, I want a great position, I want space and freedom. I want to have clothes--and be as splendid as your career is going to be. I want to be a great and shining lady in your life. I can't always live as I do now, dependent on my mother, whirled about by her movements, living in her light. Why should I be just a hard-up Vestal Virgin, Stephen, in your honor? You will not be able to marry me for years and years and years--unless you neglect your work, unless you throw away everything that is worth having between us in order just to get me." "But I want _you_, Mary," I cried, drumming at the little green table with my fist. "I want you. I want nothing else in all the world unless it has to do with you." "You've got me--as much as anyone will ever have me. You'll always have me. Always I will write to you, talk to you, watch you. Why are you so greedy, Stephen? Why are you so ignoble? If I were to come now and marry you, it wouldn't help you. It would turn you into--a wife-keeper, into the sort of uninteresting preoccupied man one sees running after and gloating over the woman he's bought--at the price of his money and his dignity--and everything.... It's not proper for a man to live so for a woman and her children. It's dwarfish. It's enslaving. It's--it's indecent. Stephen! I'd hate you so." ... § 7 We parted at last at a cab-rank near a bridge over the Canal at the western end of Park Village. I remember that I made a last appeal to her as we walked towards it, and that we loitered on the bridge, careless of who might see us there, in a final conflict of our wills. "Before it is too late, Mary, dear," I said. She shook her head, her white lips pressed together. "But after the things that have happened. That night--the moonlight!" "It's not fair," she said, "for you to talk of that. It isn't fair." "But Mary. This is parting. This indeed is parting." She answered never a word. "Then at least talk to me again for one time more." "Afterwards," she said. "Afterwards I will talk to you. Don't make things too hard for me, Stephen." "If I could I would make this impossible. It's--it's hateful." She turned to the kerb, and for a second or so we stood there without speaking. Then I beckoned to a hansom. She told me Beatrice Normandy's address. I helped her into the cab. "Good-bye," I said with a weak affectation of an everyday separation, and I turned to the cabman with her instructions. Then again we looked at one another. The cabman waited. "All right, sir?" he asked. "Go ahead!" I said, and lifted my hat to the little white face within. I watched the cab until it vanished round the curve of the road. Then I turned about to a world that had become very large and empty and meaningless. § 8