"It is a horrible idea. Because
you aren't like the others. You _haven't_ the same sort of thoughts and
feelings. A person doesn't have to be in love with you to see that. Your
father and Rush and Mr. Hood all see it. And as for me--well, I couldn't
endure it, that's all. Oh, I know, you can act like anybody else; laugh
and dance and talk nonsense and make a person forget sometimes. But the
other thing is there all the while--shining through--oh, it can't be
talked about!--like a light. Of--of something a decent man _wants_ to be
guided by, whatever he does. And for you to go out into the world with
that, where there can't be any protection at all ... I can't stand it,
Mary. That's why I came to-day instead of Mr. Hood."

She went very white during that speech and tears came up into her eyes.
Tears of helpless exasperation. It was such a cruelly inhuman thing to
impose an ideal like that upon a woman. It was so smug, so utterly
satisfactory to all romantic sentimentalists. Wallace would approve every
word of it. Wallace had sent him to say just this;--was waiting now to be
told the good news of his success.

The fact is worth recalling, perhaps, that away back in her childhood
Wallace had sometimes reduced her to much this sort of frantic
exasperation by his impregnable assumption that she was the white-souled
little angel she looked. Sitting here in this very room he had goaded her
into committing freakish misdemeanors.

She was resisting now an impulse of much the same sort, though the
parallel did not, of course, occur to her. It was just a sort of
inexplicable panic which she was reining in with all her might by telling
herself how fond she really was of Graham and how terrible a thing it
would be if she hurt him unnecessarily. She dared not attempt to speak so
she merely waited. She was sitting relaxed, her head lowered, her chin
supported by one hand. This stillness and relaxation she always resorted
to in making any supreme demand upon her self-control.

He looked at her rather helplessly once or twice during the silence. Then
arose and moved about restlessly.

"I know you don't love me. I've gone on hoping you could after I suppose
I might have seen it wasn't possible. You've tried to and you can't. I
don't know if one as white as you could love any man--that way. Well, I'm
not going to ask any more for that. I want to ask, instead, that we be
friends. I haven't spoiled the possibility of that, have I?"