"No! Why should there be any of this conventional subterfuge. I believe that she does care for you. I believed so long ago. I was jealous of her. I don't mean, to say that I was in love with you. I--perhaps forced myself not to be. It seemed too silly. Too utterly hopeless.... Besides I knew even then the danger of letting myself go ... of the unbridled imagination. Probably love is all imagination anyhow. French marriages would seem to prove it. But we--your race and mine--have fallen into a sublime sort of error, and we'll no more reason ourselves out of it than out of the sex tyranny itself.... I don't see how I could be happy with the eternal knowledge that Gora was miserable--that she would be happy if I had remained in California...." "I have just told you that I should have gone to California as soon as I was free." III The air between them quivered and their eyes were almost one. But he remained smoking in his chair and continued: "I marry you or no one. A man well and a man ill are two different beings. In illness sex is dormant. When a man is well he wants a woman or he doesn't want her. It may be neither his fault nor hers. But if she hasn't the sex pull for him, doesn't make a powerful insistent demand upon his passion, there is nothing to build on. I haven't come out alive from that shrieking hell to be satisfied with second-class emotions. I lay one night under three dead bodies, not one over twenty-five. I knew them all. Each was deeply in love with a woman.... Well, I knew the value of life that night if I never did before. And life was given to us, when we can hold on to it, for the highest happiness of which we are individually capable, no matter what else we are forced to put up with. Happiness at the highest pitch, not makeshifts.... The horrors, the obstacles, the very demons in our own characters were second thoughts on the part of Life either to satisfy her own spite or to throw her highest purpose into stronger relief. I'll have the highest or nothing." "But that is not everything. There must be other things to make it lasting. Gora would make a great companion." "Not half so great--to me--as you would and you know it. I hope you will understand that I dislike extremely to speak of Miss Dwight at all. If you had not brought her name into it I never should have done so. But now I feel I must have a complete understanding with you at any cost." He dropped his cigarette on the table. He left his chair swiftly and snatched her from her own. His face was dark and he was trembling even more than she was. "I'll have you ... have you...." She nodded. CHAPTER XII I