She began to say her say, her voice reflective as his own had been. “But you have shown me frightful things, shown me how far and oh, how quick, a thing that starts may go. Oh, my dear, know the answer before it ever is suggested. Sacrifices! It is sacrifice for the children that you profess to mean. Well, let us call it that. Have you ever heard of a father sacrificing himself for his children? There’s no such phrase. There’s only the feminine gender for that. ‘Sacrificed himself for his wife and children.’ It’s a solecism. If grammar means good sense, it isn’t grammar because it’s meaningless. It can’t be said. It’s grotesque. But ‘Sacrificed herself for her husband and her children,’--why, that the commonest of cliches. It’s written on half the mothers’ brows; it should be carved on half the mothers’ tombs--upon my own dear mother’s.” She stood up and faced him. “Harry, not on mine.” She put a gentle hand on his. “I love you--you know what our love is. I love the children--with a truer love that they have never been a burden to me nor I on a single occasion out of mood with them. But, Harry, I will not sacrifice myself for the children. When I ask that of you, ask it of me. But I never will ask it of you.” She was trembling. He put an arm about her shoulders. “It’s over. It’s over. Let’s forget it, Rosalie.” Of course she did not forget it. Of course she knew that Harry could not. Men that marry for a home! Already in his mind the thought that for his home she should give up, not only this present forward step, but--everything! Oh, man-made world! Oh, man-made men! “It’s over. It’s over,” he had said. Of course she knew it was not over. Men that marry for a home! Secret she had kept it and in the same moment that she had realised the significance of her secrecy it had been enlarged. Now it stalked abroad. But what is to be observed is the quality of the love between them. It was through the children that he had made this claim that he had sought to impose upon her. She had told him, as she believed, that what he thought he saw was fancy. It never occurred to her to imagine so base a thing as that he, to give himself grounds, had invented or even exaggerated his fancy; but it had been excusable in her (threatened as she saw herself) to avoid, in the days that followed, discussion of that fancy, much less herself to bring it forward. Her love for Harry was never in that plane. It could admit no guile. It happened that within the week she was herself a little pained by a matter with the children. She took her pain straight to her Harry.