She shrugged her shoulders, after a habit she had. "That would be your responsibility. Don’t you see? I’m not thinking so much about you as I am about myself. It’s nothing to me what you are, not any more than what Lydia is, or a dozen others I could name to you. I think it highly probable that Lydia Blair will take the road we call going to the bad—" "Oh, surely not!" This invitation to digression she also swept aside. "She won’t do it with her eyes shut, never fear! She’ll know all about it, and take her own way because it’s hers. Don’t pity her. If I were half so free—" "Well?" "Well, for one thing, you’d have another chance. If you didn’t use it that would be your own affair." "Why do you speak of another chance? Do you think—?" "Oh, don’t ask me what I think. I take it for granted that—" "Yes? Please tell me. What is it that you take for granted?" "What good would it do for me to tell you?" "It would do the good that I should know." "Well, then, I take it for granted, since you insist, that you’ve done something, somewhere—" "And still you’d lend me as much money as I asked for?" "What difference does it make to me? I want you to have another chance. I shouldn’t want it if you didn’t need it; and you wouldn’t need it unless there was something wrong with you. There! Is that plain enough? But because there is something wrong with you I want to come in and help you put it right. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, so long as those are the facts." "But I’m obliged to care, don’t you see? If I were to take advantage of your generosity—" "Tell me truthfully now. Would you do it if I were a man, a friend, who insisted on helping you to start again?" I tried to gain time. "It would depend on the motive." "We’ll assume the motive to be nothing but pure friendship, just the desire that you should have every opportunity to make good again, and nothing else. _Absolutely nothing else_! Do you understand? Would you take it from him then? Please tell me as frankly as if—" "I—I might." "And because I’m not a man but a woman, you can’t." "It isn’t the same thing." "Which is just what we women complain of, just what we fight against, the stupid conventions that force us into being useless in a world—" "Oh, but there are other ways of being useful." "No other way of being useful compensates for the one which seems to you paramount, above all others, and from which you are debarred." "But why should it? You and I never met till—" "You can’t argue that way. You can’t reason about the thing at all. I’m not reasoning, further than to say that—that I believe in you, in your power of—of coming back. That’s the phrase, isn’t it? And as, apparently, I’m the only one in a position to go to your aid—" She threw out her hands with a gesture she sometimes used which implied that all had been said.