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by what you've told me, or because you can't forgive me for not letting you tell me before?" "You know which!" she said. "Well, then, what should you think of some other man if he could care for such a thing, when some other girl had told it him of herself? You would think him very unjust and----" "But it isn't some other man; it isn't some other girl!" "No, I'm glad it isn't. But can't we reason about it as if it were?" "No, we can't. It would be--wicked." "It would be wicked not to. Do you think you ought to break our engagement because I didn't let you tell me this at first?" Cornelia could not say that she did; she could hardly say, "I don't know." Ludlow assumed that she had said more. "Then if you don't think you ought to do it for that, do you think you ought to do it for nothing?" "For nothing?" Cornelia asked herself. Was there really nothing else, then? She stood looking at him, as if she were asking him that aloud. He was not so far off as when they began to talk, just after they had risen, and now he suddenly came much nearer still. "Are you going to drive me from you because I don't care for all this?" "You ought to care," she persisted. "But if I don't? If I can't? Then what is the reason you won't let it all be as if nothing had happened? Ah, I see! You can't forgive me for sending you his letter! Well, I deserve to be punished for that!" "No; I should have despised you if you hadn't----" "Well?" She was silent, looking at the floor. He put his arm round her, and pushed her head down on his shoulder. "Oh, how silly!" she said, with lips muted against his own. XXXIX. Cornelia and Ludlow were married at Pymantoning in the latter part of June, and he spent the summer there, working at a picture which he was going to exhibit in the fall. At the same time he worked at a good many other pictures, and he helped Cornelia with the things she was trying. He painted passages and incidents in her pictures, sometimes illustratively, and sometimes for the pleasure of having their lives blended in their work, and he tried to see how nearly he could lose his work in hers. He pretended that he learned more than he taught in the process, and that he felt in her efforts a determining force, a clear sense of what she wanted to do, that gave positive form and direction to what was vague and speculative in himself. He was strenuous that she should not, in the slightest degree, laps
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