"You say _we_," she reminded him, lifting her white shoulders. "And I mean you and I," he returned bluntly. "I've come here to do some straight talking." There leaped up into his eyes a light she had never seen there until now, a quick colour ran into his cheeks. "I want you to marry me, Claire." Perhaps the woman's pulse quickened. Certainly no change in her expression, no quiver of a muscle, no deepened breathing told that a supreme moment had come into her life, a moment she had long and unceasingly striven for. "Do you?" she asked indifferently. "Why?" "Because," he cried, "you are like no other woman in all the world. Because the things that I want are the things that you want. Because we should be a man and a woman, mated, to take our places in the world and hold them. Where there is man's work I can do it; where there is woman's work you can do it. We are young; in ten years' time we can rise to whatever we care to set our eyes upon. Why do I want you? Just because in brain and in body you are the woman in the world fitted to occupy the place that shall be my wife's." "Other men have asked me to marry them," she said coolly. "I think that all of them have said something about love." "And I love you," he told her. "A man cannot come to care for a woman without her knowing it. I don't come to you bleating about a breaking heart, because you are no fool and I am no fool. If you were the kind to care about a lot of sentimental rot you wouldn't be the woman you are, you wouldn't be the woman I'd want. I'd be good to you. I'd give you the power that a beautiful woman with a strong, rich husband can come to have in San Francisco, in New York, in London if you like. When I rise you'll rise with me. I'll have men know that my wife shall have the place, above the heads of their wives, that she wants. And I'll be proud of you!" Then he got his answer as seldom a woman has answered a man. She lifted her eyes to his, she put back her head with the tossing regal gesture he knew so well, her lips parted slowly--and she laughed. Laughed at him in a sudden mirth of leaping scorn, that was hard and cruel, that mocked and sneered at him, that took supreme toll of the supreme moment. Laughed as she saw the light quiver and die in his eyes, as the colour faded from his cheeks and ran back red.