"I've tried to be fair to Aleck," she mused almost tenderly. "I've tried to remember always that men are different from women, and that Aleck perhaps is different from most men. I've tried to remember always that he is a musician--a real, real musician with all the ghastly, agonizing extremes of temperament. I've tried to remember always that he didn't grow up here with us in our little town with all our fierce, little-town standards, but that he was educated abroad, that his whole moral, mental, and social ideals are different, that the admiration and adulation of--new--women is like the breath of life to him--that he simply couldn't live without it any more than I could live without the love of animals, or the friendship of children, or the wonderfulness of outdoors, all of which bore _him_ to distraction. "Oh, I've reasoned it all out, night after night after night, fought it out, _torn_ it out, that he probably really and truly did love me quite a good deal--in his own way--when there wasn't anything else to do. But how can it possibly content a woman to have a man love her as well as _he_ knows how--if it isn't as well as _she_ knows how? We won't talk about--Aleck Reese's morals," she finished abruptly. "Fickleness, selfishness, neglect, even infidelity itself, are such purely minor, incidental data of the one big, incurably rotten and distasteful fact that--such and such a man is _stupid in the affections_." With growing weakness she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes. For an anxious moment Drew sat and watched her. "Is that all?" he asked at last. She opened her eyes in surprise. "Why, yes," she said, "that's all--that is, it's all if you understand. I'm not complaining because Aleck Reese didn't love me, but because, loving me, he wasn't _intelligent_ enough to be true to me. You do understand, don't you? You understand that it wasn't because he didn't pay his love bills, but because he didn't know enough to pay them. He took my loyalty without paying for it with his; he took my devotion, my tenderness, my patience, without ever, ever making any adequate return. Any girl ought to be able to tell in six months whether her lover is using her affection rightly, whether he is taking her affection and investing it with his toward their mutual happiness and home. Aleck invested nothing. He just took all my love that he could grab and squandered it on himself--always and forever on himself. A girl, I say, ought to be able to tell in six months. But I am very stupid. It has taken me three years." "Well, what do you want _me_ to do?" Drew asked a bit quizzically. "I want you to advise me," she said. "Advise you--_what_?" persisted Drew. The first real flicker of comedy flamed in the girl's face. Her white cheeks pinked and dimpled. "Why, advise me to--marry _you_!" she announced. "WELL, WHY NOT?" She fairly hurled the three-word bridge across the sudden, awful chasm of silence that yawned before her.