u made it possible for me to be anything else?"

"Then I'll make it possible for you now: to begin, I am too old to
be called to account for my actions--except by those who have the
right."

"You mean, that I have no right--after what has passed--"

"Nothing has passed between us!"

"Marguerite," he said, "do you mean that you do not love me?"

"Can you not see?"

She was standing on the steps above him. The many-fluted parasol
with its long silken fringes rested on one shoulder. Her face in
the dazzling sunlight, under her hat, had lost its gayety. Her
eyes rested upon his with perfect quietness.

"I do not believe that you yourself know whether you love me," he
said, laughing pitifully. His big mouth twitched and his love had
come back into his eyes quickly enough.

"Let me tell you how I know," she said, with more kindness. "If I
loved you, I could not stand here and speak of it to you in this
way. I could not tell you you are not a man. Everything in me
would go down before you. You could do with my life what you
pleased. No one in comparison with you would mean anything to
me--not even mamma. As long as I was with you, I should never wish
to sleep; if you were away from me, I should never wish to waken.
If you were poor, if you were in trouble, you would be all the
dearer to me--if you only loved me, only loved me!"

Who is it that can mark down the moment when we ceased to be
children? Gazing backward in after years, we sometimes attempt
dimly to fix the time. "It probably occurred on that day," we
declare; "it may have taken place during that night. It coincided
with that hardship, or with that mastery of life." But a child can
suffer and can triumph as a man or a woman, yet remain a child.
Like man and woman it can hate, envy, malign, cheat, lie,
tyrannize; or bless, cheer, defend, drop its pitying tears, pour
out its heroic spirit. Love alone among the passions parts the two
eternities of a lifetime. The instant it is born, the child which
was its parent is dead.

As Marguerite suddenly ceased speaking, frightened by the secret
import of her own words, her skin, which had the satinlike fineness
and sheen of white poppy leaves, became dyed from brow to breast
with a surging flame of rose. She turned partly away from Barbee,
and she waited for him to go.

He looked at her a moment with torment in his eyes; then, lifting
his hat without a word, he turned and walked proudly down the