htening up.

"What any man works for, I suppose."

"Ah, there you have hit it,--what any man works for in our world.
Power,--personal power. You want to be somebody,--isn't that it? Not the
noblest ambition, you'll have to admit,--not the kind of thing we used
to dream about, when we did dream. Well, when we find we can't realize
our dreams, we take the next best thing. And I fail to see why you
should blame me for taking it when you yourself have taken it. Hambleton
Durrett can give it to me. He'll accept me on my own terms, he won't
interfere with me, I shan't be disillusionized,--and I shall have a
position which I could not hope to have if I remained unmarried, a very
marked position as Hambleton Durrett's wife. I am thirty, you know."

Her frankness appalled me.

"The trouble with you, Hugh, is that you still deceive yourself. You
throw a glamour over things. You want to keep your cake and eat it too.

"I don't see why you say that. And marriage especially--"

She took me up.

"Marriage! What other career is open to a woman? Unless she is married,
and married well, according to the money standard you men have set up,
she is nobody. We can't all be Florence Nightingales, and I am unable
to imagine myself a Julia Ward Howe or a Harriet Beecher Stowe. What is
left? Nothing but marriage. I'm hard and cynical, you will say, but I
have thought, and I'm not afraid, as I have told you, to look things in
the face. There are very few women, I think, who would not take the real
thing if they had the chance before it were too late, who wouldn't be
willing to do their own cooking in order to get it."

She fell silent suddenly. I began to pace the room.

"For God's sake, don't do this, Nancy!" I begged.

But she continued to stare into the fire, as though she had not heard
me.

"If you had made up your mind to do it, why did you tell me?" I asked.

"Sentiment, I suppose. I am paying a tribute to what I once was, to what
you once were," she said. "A--a sort of good-bye to sentiment."

"Nancy!" I said hoarsely.

She shook her head.

"No, Hugh. Surely you can't misjudge me so!" she answered reproachfully.
"Do you think I should have sent for you if I had meant--that!"

"No, no, I didn't think so. But why not? You--you cared once, and you
tell me plainly you don't love him. It was all a terrible mistake. We
were meant for each other."

"I did love you then," she said. "You never knew how much. And there is
nothi