"Not properly honest. I mean in giving up." "Giving up what?" "Why, everything." "Everything? Is it a question"--I stared--"of _that_?" "You would if you _were_ honest." "Everything?" I repeated. Again she stood to it. "Everything." "But is that quite the readiness I've professed?" "If it isn't then, what is?" I thought a little. "Why, isn't it simply a matter rather of the renunciation of a confidence?" "In your sense and your truth?" This, she indicated, was all she asked. "Well, what is that but everything?" "Perhaps," I reflected, "perhaps." In fact, it no doubt was. "We'll take it then for everything, and it's as so taking it that I renounce. I keep nothing at all. Now do you believe I'm honest?" She hesitated. "Well--yes, if you say so." "Ah," I sighed, "I see you don't! What can I do," I asked, "to prove it?" "You can easily prove it. You can let me go." "Does it strike you," I considered, "that I should take your going as a sign of your belief?" "Of what else, then?" "Why, surely," I promptly replied, "my assent to your leaving our discussion where it stands would constitute a very different symptom. Wouldn't it much rather represent," I inquired, "a failure of belief on my own part in _your_ honesty? If you can judge me, in short, as only pretending----" "Why shouldn't you," she put in for me, "also judge _me_? What have I to gain by pretending?" "I'll tell you," I returned, laughing, "if you'll tell me what _I_ have." She appeared to ask herself if she could, and then to decide in the negative. "If I don't understand you in any way, of course I don't in that. Put it, at any rate," she now rather wearily quavered, "that one of us has as little to gain as the other. I believe you," she repeated. "There!" "Thanks," I smiled, "for the way you say it. If you don't, as you say, understand me," I insisted, "it's because you think me crazy. And if you think me crazy I don't see how you _can_ leave me." She presently met this. "If I believe you're sincere in saying you give up I believe you've recovered. And if I believe you've recovered I don't think you crazy. It's simple enough." "Then why isn't it simple to understand me?" She turned about, and there were moments in her embarrassment, now, from which she fairly drew beauty. Her awkwardness was somehow noble; her sense of her predicament was in itself young. "Is it _ever_?" she charmingly threw out.