"I shall never change, Sibyl," I answered--"I love you,--I shall always love you. But I wish you would not analyse yourself so pitilessly,--you have such strange ideas--" "You think them strange?" she said--"You should not,--in these 'new women' days! I believe that, thanks to newspapers, magazines and 'decadent' novels, I am in all respects eminently fitted to be a wife!" and she laughed bitterly--"There is nothing in the rôle of marriage that I do not know, though I am not yet twenty. I have been prepared for a long time to be sold to the highest bidder, and what few silly notions I had about love,--the love of the poets and idealists,--when I was a dreamy child at Willowsmere, are all dispersed and ended. Ideal love is dead,--and worse than dead, being out of fashion. Carefully instructed as I have been in the worthlessness of everything but money, you can scarcely be surprised at my speaking of myself as an object of sale. Marriage for me _is_ a sale, as far as my father is concerned,--for you know well enough that however much you loved me or I loved you, he would never allow me to marry you if you were not rich, and richer than most men. I want you to feel that I fully recognize the nature of the bargain struck; and I ask you not to expect a girl's fresh, confiding love from a woman as warped in heart and mind as I am!" "Sibyl,"--I said earnestly--"You wrong yourself; I am sure you wrong yourself! You are one of those who can be in the world yet not of it; your mind is too open and pure to be sullied, even by contact with evil things. I will believe nothing you say against your own sweet and noble character,--and, Sibyl, let me again ask you not to distress me by this constant harping on the subject of my wealth, or I shall be inclined to look upon it as a curse,--I should love you as much if I were poor----" "Oh, you might love me"--she interrupted me, with a strange smile--"but you would not dare to say so!" I was silent. Suddenly she laughed, and linked her arms caressingly round my neck. "There, Geoffrey!" she said--"I have finished my discourse,--my bit of Ibsenism, or whatever other ism affects me,--and we need not be miserable about it. I have said what was in my mind; I have told you the truth, that in heart I am neither young nor innocent. But I am no worse than all my 'set' so perhaps you had better make the best of me. I please your fancy, do I not?" "My love for you cannot be so lightly expressed, Sibyl!" I answered in rather a pained tone.