"If you and I had been everything to each other, and you were saying 'Let us go on living the one life' and I were hesitating, then you'd be right. And I couldn't hesitate, Donald. If you were mine, nothing could make me give you up, but when it's only the hope of having you, then pride and self-respect have a chance to be heard." He was ready to move on. "There's something in that," said he, lapsed into his usual seeming of impassiveness. "But not much." "I never before knew you to fail to understand." "I understand perfectly. You care, but you don't care enough to suit me. I haven't waited all these years before giving a woman my love, to be content with a love seated quietly and demurely between pride and self-respect." "You wouldn't marry me until I had failed," said she shrewdly. "Now you attack me for refusing to marry you until I've succeeded." A slight shrug. "Proposal withdrawn," said he. "Now let's talk about your career, your plans." "I'm beginning to understand myself a little," said she. "I suppose you think that sort of personal talk is very silly and vain--and trivial." "On the contrary," replied he, "it isn't absolutely necessary to understand oneself. One is swept on in the same general direction, anyhow. But understanding helps one to go faster and steadier." "It began, away back, when I was a girl--this idea of a career. I envied men and despised women, the sort of women I knew and met with. I didn't realize why, then. But it was because a man had a chance to be somebody in himself and to do something, while a woman was just a--a more or less ornamental belonging of some man's--what you want me to become now." "As far as possible from my idea." "Don't you want me to belong to you?" "As I belong to you." "That sounds well, but it isn't what could happen. The fact is, Donald, that I want to belong to you--want to be owned by you and to lose myself in you. And it's that I'm fighting." She felt the look he was bending upon her, and glowed and colored under it, but did not dare to turn her eyes to meet it. Said he: "Why fight it? Why not be happy?" "Ah, but that's just it," cried she. "I shouldn't be happy. And I should make you miserable. The idea of a career--the idea that's rooted deep in me and can't ever be got out, Donald; it would torment me. You couldn't kill it, no matter how much you loved me. I'd yield for the time. Then, I'd go back--or, if I didn't, I'd be wretched and make you wish you'd never seen me." "I understand," said he. "I don't believe it, but I understand." "You think I'm deceiving myself, because you saw me wasting my life, playing the idler and the fool, pretending I was working toward a career when I was really making myself fit for nothing but to be Stanley Baird's mistress." "And you're still deceiving yourself. You won't see the truth." "No matter," said she. "I must go on and make a career--some kind of a career." "At what?" "At grand opera."