“Exactly. For a long time I didn’t know how I loved him just because I had always taken all that you are saying for granted, in the funniest, most naïvely conceited way; I took it for granted that I was a very big person and that the man I married must stand for big opportunities. Now, you see,” she finished, “he is my big opportunity.” He was accepting it all now with no protest. “Next to no money, I suppose?” he questioned simply. “Next to none, Jim.” “It means obscurity, unless a man has ambition.” “It means all the things I’ve always hated.” She smiled a little over these strange old hatreds. Again a silence fell, and it was again Grainger who broke it. “You may as well let me have the last drop of gall,” he said. “Own that if it hadn’t been for him you might have come to care for me.” Still he did not look at her, and it was easier, so, to let him have the last gulp. “I probably should.” He meditated the mixed flavor for some moments; pure gall would have been easier to swallow. And he took refuge at last in school-boy phraseology. “I should like to break all the furniture in the room.” “I should like to break some, too,” she rejoined, but she laughed out suddenly at this anticlimax, and, even before the unbroken heaviness of the gaze now turned on her, that comic aspect of their talk, the dearly, sanely comic, carried her laugh into a peal as boyish as his words. Grainger still gazed at her. “I love that in you,” he said--“your laugh. You could laugh at death.” “Ah, Jim,” she said, smiling on, though with the laughter tears had come to her eyes, “it’s a good deal more difficult to laugh at life, sometimes. And we both have to do a lot of living before we can laugh at death.” “A lot of living,” he repeated. His stern, firm face had a queer grimace of pain at the prospect of it, and again she put out her hand to him. “Let me count for as much as I can, always,” she said. “You will always count for so much with me.” He had taken the hand, and he looked at her in a long silence that promised, accepted, everything. But an appeal, a demand, wistful yet insistent, came into his silence as he looked--looked at the odd, pale, dear face, the tawny, russet hair, the dear, deep eyes. “I’m going now,” he said, holding to his breast the hand she had given him. “And I will ask one thing of you--a thing I’ve never had and never shall, I suppose, again.” “What is it, Jim?” But before his look she almost guessed and the guessing made her blanch. “Let me take you in my arms and kiss you,” said Grainger. “Ah, Jim!” Seeing herself as cruel, ungenerous, she yet, in a recoil of her whole nature, seemed to snatch from him a treasure, unclaimed, but no longer hers to give. Grainger eyed her. “You could. You would--if it weren’t for him.” “You understand that, too, Jim. I could and would.” “He robs me of even that, then--your gift of courageous pity.”