'We have got to talk,' he said. 'If you convince me I have no right to--well, to commit what will probably be a very lengthy suicide, I will smoke no more. If you don't, I shall continue to smoke, and in the interval I can talk more easily. Now you have spoken so frankly to me, I shall use the same frankness.' She nodded. 'A man's life,' he said, 'belongs to himself until he has given it to a woman, and she has accepted it. Then it is no longer his, but hers, and she may dispose of it. No woman has accepted mine.' She made a little movement in her chair, as if wincing, and he saw it. 'Shall I not go on?' he said. 'No, go on; it is this for which I came here.' 'So everybody,' said he, 'has about the same weight with me, and that combined weight is less than my right to do as I choose. Bertie Keynes, you, Judy, Ginger--you all want me to be what you call sensible, and live as long as possible. But my indifference to life is stronger than your desire that I should live. My mother alone wishes me to do as I choose, because she understands.' He paused, and saw that Sybil was looking, not at him, but into the fire, and that unshed tears stood in her eyes, fighting with some emotion that would not let them fall. 'I understand too,' she said in a whisper; and it looked as if the tears would have their way. Then they were checked again as she continued: 'But you are grossly unfair to me--both you and Judy. You saddle me with this responsibility. You say it is my fault that you are indifferent to life. Indeed it is not fair. I am what I am. You may hate me or love me, but it is me. I am hard, I dare say, without the power to love; that is me too. And you say to me, "Alter that, please, and become exceedingly tender and devoted." And because I don't--ah, there is your mistake; it is because I can't. I could pray and think and agonize, and yet not add an inch to my stature; and do you think, then, it is likely that I could alter what is so vastly more _me_ than my height?' 'Ah, I don't blame you,' said he, 'and I don't saddle you with any responsibility.' 'But if I loved you, you would care to live.' 'Yes; but I don't say that it is your fault that you don't. That would be interfering in your life--a thing which I am deprecating in regard to my own.' She made a hopeless gesture with her hands. 'We are talking in a circle,' she said. 'Leave it for a moment; I have something else to tell you.' He sat very upright in his chair, grasping the arms in his hands, feeling that he knew for certain what this was. 'You mean you are going to marry Harold Bilton?' 'No, I mean exactly the opposite; I mean that I am not.' He dropped the cigarette he had just lit into the fireplace. With her woman's quickness, she instantly saw the symbolical application of this, and, with her passion for analysis, could not resist casting a fly, as it were, over it. She pointed to the grate. 'You have dropped your cigarette,' she said.