“No,” he returned rather sharply, “no; you must hear me, Dorothy. No man can associate with you long without growing to think of you as a woman altogether different from others. You are the cleverest woman in London. You fascinate because you puzzle and mystify men. Even women cannot resist you. They are attracted to you much as the men are—because they do not comprehend you, because they find you different. But, Dorothy, my love for you draws its inspiration from a source wholly unguessed by your other friends. I love you because you are the one woman in my world who sees the pathos and the meaning of life—my life and any life that fails and drowns and dies in the rush and the madness of existence. I have discovered the real you—the you behind the clever, fashionable, worldly Mrs. March—and I claim you by right of discovery.” “Why, Dick, what nonsense!” she cried, with a not very successful effort to smile down the tears that his searching look and his throbbing words had brought to those great hazel eyes of hers. “What nonsense! I am only an ambitious woman of the world, happy in the possession of social influence. I am hard and cold and calculating—and anyhow, really, dear, dear boy, you must not think of this any more. I mean it.” “To some you may seem worldly,” he went on, ignoring her protest; “but I know you. And I was forgetting to justify myself by telling you that I now have the right to speak. I am no longer penniless, Dorothy. I am now in a position to ask you to share my life on the plane to which you are accustomed. Will you listen?” “I must not—I cannot—don’t be cruel, Dick,” she answered. “And aren’t you a bit hard on me when you imply that I would listen to you now, but that I would not have done so when you were poor? Am I so mercenary?” “No,” he said warmly; “but I should have despised myself had I spoken when I had not the means to support you. Dorothy, my love for you began the night you had that poor Bohemian boy play the violin at your little party. The idiots who crowded your rooms gambled all the time the marvelous lad was playing; but I saw you whisper to him when he finished one sublime number, and noted how his thin, white face lighted up with gratitude and hope at whatever it was you said to him. Well, you know he died of consumption in my chambers a few months afterward. Among his papers I found the letter you wrote him inclosing ten pounds. That letter revealed you to me. It was glorious! It was you! From that time I have loved you with a love passing the love of women. Poverty, which until that time had seemed rather a welcome refuge and protection to me, now became a hell, for it alone barred me from the hope of speaking to you. But today I am a comparatively rich man. Dorothy, be my wife.” “Oh, Dick, Dick, this is awful—don’t!” she cried, shrinking from him. “Pray, pray, stop—really you must not go on!”