And she was not talking any generalities, and Harry was not, either. They weren’t, either of them, playing with this idea of mutual independence. There would “of course” be a business basis to it, Rosalie said. She was earning her own income and she would pay her half of the upkeep of their home together. It was a stipulation that she advanced with a definite fear that here, at last, she might be taking Harry from his depth; that by natural instinct of generosity, or by instinct of immemorial custom to endow the wife with all the husband’s worldly goods, he would here reveal a flaw in his till now flawless duplication of the views that were her own. But Harry (the never failing rapture of it!) was every way without spot or blemish. He was looking straight and close into her eyes while she put forward this, and there moved not the least dissentient shade across his own while he received it. She need have had no fear. He said, “I agree absolutely with that, Rosalie. There’s only one point--” and his expansion of this point wholly entranced her because it established conditions even more matter-of-fact and businesslike than her own broad principle. “There’s only one point,” Harry said. “It can’t be half and half in terms of actual bisection. Look, Rosalie, in this matter of running the home we’re making a contract between two parties and--don’t forget I’m a lawyer--it has to be an equable and just contract, and to be that it has to be based for each party’s liability--Do you like me to use the law jargon?” She nodded. “I do, I do!” This was frightfully, entrancingly serious for her. This was a survey of the fortifications of her second line of her defences. “I do, I do!” “Well, has to be based for each party’s liability on each party’s interest, on the extent to which each party is involved. I’m making more--an uncommon good bit more--than you are, Rosalie. My interest, therefore my liability, that is, my share, has to be allowed to be proportionately the more. Put it in another way. We’re going to run an establishment as an establishment might be run by two or more people of different incomes who wish to join forces for mutual pleasure, two or three relatives, two or three friends. Well, there’s a regular principle governing that kind of arrangement. You don’t all pay the same. If you did, you’d reduce the scale of living to the level of what the poorest can afford, and half the idea of the combination is to enjoy a very much better scale. No, you run the show on the level the wealthiest is willing to go to, and to the total charge each one contributes in the proportion of his income. If one party has a thousand a year and the other five hundred, and the thousand-pounder wants to live at the rate of nine hundred a year, he pays six hundred and the other three hundred. Each is paying his just share--that’s the point. That’s how we’d arrange it, Rosalie.”