"Oh, not marriage! I hate the very word!" she said indignantly. "That would spoil everything! I want to be Dodo! I don't want to change. And you want to make me! What would happen? After a while you would want me to be like your formal women, society women, and I should be bored, or you would get tired of me. And then my heart would break!" "But, great God! child, haven't you any morality?" he exclaimed, beyond himself. "Have I always got to protect you against yourself?" "Is it my morality," she said, opening her eyes, "or what society will think of you, that you are worried about?" He was silent, without an answer. "Listen!" she continued determinedly. "This must stop! I said I was going to decide everything on the tenth. I'm not! I can't stand it! To-morrow I'm going to settle everything. Do you love me enough to run away with me to-morrow?" "Do you really, honestly, in the bottom of your crazy romantic heart, believe you would do such a thing?" he asked solemnly. She was instantly a-tremble with an electric ardor. "Would I? Would I sacrifice this for something real, something immense, for a perfect blinding love? Oh, how can you ask!" "And if I come to-morrow and say 'Come!' you will leave everything and go with me, anywhere?" She put her two hands in his with a gesture of a Siddons. "Anywhere!" He retained his doubts, but he did not discuss. Finally he said: "Very well! To-morrow afternoon I will come and tell you my decision! You are right. This must end, one way or the other!" "When?" "At five o'clock!" "At five, then. If not--" "If not, what?" "I shall have made another decision!" They said little during the remainder of the trip back, the gravity of the crisis that had been imposed affecting them both. She had only faint belief that he would come, as she wished him to come; and her eyes resting on the sudden electric paraphernalia of the theaters, the gilded outward trappings, the billboards, and the displays on the sidewalk, she lost herself in reveries, feeling the mountain of drudgery she would have to move. Besides, another thing obtruded itself between them--the lie, slight as it had been, that she had told. She was vaguely aware of it, unable to return into the intimacy of her first clinging attitude. Arrived at the house, he mounted the steps with her, and said gravely: "Very well, Dodo! I take you at your word. I don't know what it will be. What you ask from me is as great, probably a greater sacrifice than you would make. But I may do as you wish! To-morrow, in any case, I will come!"