He ignored this. “Life moves on in epochs, Sue. If you don't start getting educated when you're a youngster, you go most awfully wrong. If you don't accept the discipline of work as soon as you've got a little education and grown up, you're a slacker and before long you're very properly rated as a slacker. So with a woman--given this wonderful function of motherhood and the big emotional capacity that goes with it--if she waits too long after her body and Spirit have ripened she goes wrong, emotionally and spiritually. There's a time with a normal woman when love and maternity are--well, the next thing. Not with every woman of course. But pretty certainly with the woman who reaches that time, refuses marriage, and then is forced to admit that her life isn't working out. Peter has coined the word for what that woman becomes--a better word than he himself knows... she's a truffler.” She was gazing at him. “Henry,” she cried, “what has struck you? Where's that humorous balance of yours?” “I'm in earnest, Sue.” “Yes, I see. But why on earth--” “Because I want you to marry--” It was at this moment that the Worm's small courage fled utterly out of his inexperienced heart. And his tongue, as if to play a saturnine trick on that heart, repeated the phrase, unexpectedly to what was left of his brain, with an emphatic downward emphasis that closed the discussion. “I want you to marry,” he said. A sudden moisture came to Sue's eyes, and much of the old frankness as she surveyed him. “Henry,” she said then, “you are wonderful, coming at me like this, as if you cared--” “I do care--” “I know. I feel it. Just when I thought friends were--well...” She did not finish this, but sat erect, pushed her teacup aside and gazed at him with something of the old alertness in the green-brown eyes. There was sudden color in her cheeks. “Henry, you've roused me--just when I thought no one could. I've got to think.... You go away. You don't mind, do you? Just let me be alone. I've felt lately as if I was losing--my mind, my will, my perceptions--something. And, Henry--wait!” For he had risen, with a blank face, and was looking for his hat. “Wait--did Peter leave you his itinerary?” The Worm felt in his pockets and produced it. “He sent me one, but I tore it up.” She laughed a little, then colored with a nervous suddenness; and walked after him to the door. “You've always had the faculty of rousing me, Henry, and steadying me. To-day you've stirred me more than you could possibly know. I don't know what will come of it--I'm dreadfully; confused--but I can at least try to think it out.” That was all--all but a few commonplace phrases at the doer. “Oh,” said he, with a touch of awkwardness, “I meant to tell you that I've made a change myself.” “You?” Again her eyes, recalled to him, ran over his new clothes. “I start work to-morrow, on _The Evening Courier_.” “Oh, Henry, I'm glad. Good luck! It ought to be interesting.”