He understood her--all that she accepted, all that she avowed. Her hand was that of a comrade in misfortune. She forgave brutality from a heart as stricken as his. She forgave even his cruelly clear seeing of her own desperate case--a seeing that had revealed to her that it was indeed very desperate. But if she too was stricken, she too was resolute, and she could do no more for him than look with him at the truth. Their eyes recognized so many likenesses in each other. He took the hand at last in both his own, looking down at it, pressing it hard. “Poor darling,” he said. “No, Jim.” “Yes; even if he loves you.” “Even if he doesn’t love me--and he does love me in a strange, unwilling way; but even if he doesn’t love me,--as you and I mean love,--I am not piteous.” “Even if he loves you, you are piteous.” All his savagery had fallen from him. His quiet was like the slow dropping of tears. “No, Jim. There is the joy of loving. You know that.” “You are more piteous than I, Eppie. You, _you_, to sue to such a man. He is the negation of everything you mean. To live with him would be like fighting for breath. If you marry him,--if you bring him to it,--he’ll suffocate you.” “No, Jim,” she repeated,--and now, looking up, he saw in those beloved eyes the deep wells of solemn joy,--“I am the stronger.” “In fighting, yes, perhaps. Not in every-day, passive life. He’ll kill you.” “Even if he kills me he’ll not conquer me.” He shook away the transcendentalism with a gentle impatience, “Much good that would do to me, who would only know that you were gone. Oh, Eppie!--“ He pressed and let fall her hand. The words of the crisis were over. Anything else would be only, as it were, the filling in of the grave. He had walked away from her to the window, and said presently, while he looked out: “And I thought that you were ambitious. I loved you for it, too. I didn’t want a wife who would acquiesce in the common lot or make a virtue of incapacity. I wanted a woman who would rather fail, open-eyed, in a big venture than rest in security. You would have buckled the sword on a man and told him that he must conquer high places for you. You would have told him that he must crown you and make you shine in the world’s eyes, as well as in his own. And I could do it. You are so worthy of all the biggest opportunities and so unfit for little places. It’s so stupid, you know,” he finished, “that you aren’t in love with me.” “It is stupid, I own it,” Eppie acquiesced. He found a certain relief in following these bitterly comic aspects of their case and presently took it up again with: “I am so utterly the man for you and he is so utterly not the man. I don’t mean that I’m big enough or enough worth your while, but at least I could give you something, and I could fight for you. He won’t fight, for you, or for anything.” “I shall have to do all the fighting if I get him.” “You want him so that you don’t mind anything else. I see that.”