ere she lifted her head with pride, and
folded her arms on her chest. "Maybe you don't think it took some
training. Maybe you don't think it took some will and grit when I was a
little kid to keep right on at my exercises when I ached so bad that the
tears would run down my cheeks all the time I was at them. My mother
knew that you had to begin young and keep at 'em all the time, but mom
never would have had the nerve to keep me to it. She used often to cry
with me.

"When I was a girl I'd liked to have had a good time, just in that
careless way like other girls, but I gave that up, too, so's I could
work at my dancing. When I'd get tired and blue I'd look at the stones
I'd begun to collect with the money I'd earned. I'm hard, yes, I guess
you're right. I guess you got to have a streak of hardness in you to be
one of the biggest dancers in the world, or to be the biggest anything,
but"--here she ran across the room and was down on her knees beside his
chair--"I'm not hard any longer. Those jewels there," pointing to the
table behind her, "they don't mean a thing to me any longer, nor my
dancing, either, nor money, nor applause, nor anything in the world but
you."

He shrank away from her as if he feared the subduing magnetism of her
touch. "The useless cog to drop away when you get tired of him! I told
you your life was all rounded and complete."

"It's not," she cried passionately, "without love. Without your love.
I've got it and you can't take it away from me."

He brushed the wing of hair back from his pallid face. "My love!" His
voice seemed to drip the bitterness of gall. "Where in heaven's name is
there any place for it?"

"There isn't much room for anything else," she returned, "and that's the
truth. I've told you that all those things that you say make my life
complete, don't mean that," she snapped her long fingers, "not that to
me any more. I've told you that I'd give them all up for you if you
asked me, but," and here she swept to her feet, as if upborne by a rush
of earnestness so intense and deeply felt that it was in itself a
passion, "but I'll give 'em up, for it's a lot to give, for the man I
know you are and--and not for the man that's been shirking life."

Since the first moments after she had begun to voice her experiences,
and what he called her merciless philosophy, he had crumpled down in his
chair, and when she had sprung up, he had risen perfunctorily and
wearily to his feet, but at her l