"Do you suppose you have to tell me," she asked, "what is lacking in my life or how hungry I am for it? I knew years ago what it was to love you ... and I've dreamed of it ever since. But all your appeal is to passion, Stuart--none of it to the sense of fair play. I'm neither sexless nor nerveless. When I held you off a little while ago, my hands on your breast could feel the beat of your heart--and the arms that kept us apart were aching to go round your neck. I've sat back there in the window of my room night after night and watched you walking in the pines, and I've wanted to go out and comfort you.... I've been hungry for the touch of your hand on mine ... for everything that love can give." It was difficult for him to stand there under the curb of self-restraint and listen, but as yet he achieved it. And in the same quiet, yet thrilling voice she continued: "Your coming here brought a transformation. The fog lifted and I've been living the life of a lotus-eater--but now I've got to go back into the fog. Every argument you've made is an argument I've made to myself--and I know it's just temptation." "Don't you see, dearest, that you are utterly deluding yourself?" The fervency of combat came with his words. "Don't you see that all that is finest and most vital in you, is that part that's in protest? Don't you see that you are just reacting in every crisis to the cramped puritanism you once denounced?" "Puritanism!" she exclaimed, and the gentle manner of her speech stiffened suddenly into a timbre more militant. "Call it what you like. Yes, I _am_ a puritan woman, Stuart, and I thank God for the heritage--if I am always to have to fight these battles against passionate rebellion. I know puritanism now for what it is. I guess Christ might have been called a puritan, when Satan took him up on the high mountain and offered him the world." She paused only a moment, then swept on with the fervor of an ultimatum. "And since you choose to put it that way," she looked at him with eyes full of challenge, "I mean to stay the puritan woman. You've come with your southern fire and the voluptuous voice of your southern pleading, to unsettle me and make me surrender my code. You can't do it, Stuart. I love you, but I can still fight you! If that's the difference between us--the difference between puritan and cavalier--there's still a line that mustn't be crossed. To cross it means war. If you fire on Fort Sumpter, Fort Sumpter can still fire back." "How am I firing on Fort Sumpter?" he asked and she quickly responded. "You're assailing my powers of endurance. You're trying to make me take the easy course of putting desire above duty. You're trying to make me forget the ideals of the men at Valley Forge--the things that your ancestors and mine fought for when they went to war to build a nation: before they fought each other to disrupt one--loyalty and steadfastness!"