e, and so winning to Susan
was the impetuous flow of his words, that she felt herself swept away
from all the basic common sense of her character. She saw his ambition
as clearly as he saw it; she weighed his purpose, as he weighed it, in
the imaginary scales of his judgment; she accepted his estimate of his
powers as passionately as he accepted it.

"Of course you mustn't give up, Oliver; you couldn't," she said.

"You're right, I couldn't."

"If you can get steady reviewing, I believe you can manage," she
resumed. "Living in Dinwiddie costs really so very little." Her voice
thrilled suddenly. "It must be beautiful to have something that you feel
about like this. Oh, I wish I were you, Oliver! I wish a thousand times
I were you!"

Withdrawing his eyes from the sky at which he had been gazing, he turned
to look at her as if her words had arrested him. "You're a dear girl,"
he answered kindly, "and I think all the world of you." As he spoke he
thought again what a fine thing it would be for the man who could fall
in love with her. "It would be the best thing that could happen to any
man to marry a woman like that," he reflected; "she'd keep him up to the
mark and never let him grow soft. Yes, it would be all right if only
one could manage to fall in love with her--but I couldn't. She might as
well be a rose-bush for all the passion she'd ever arouse in me." Then
his charming egoism asserted itself, and he said caressingly: "I don't
believe I could stand Dinwiddie but for you, Susan."

She smiled back at him, but there was a limpid clearness in her look
which made him feel that she had seen through him while he was thinking.
This clearness, with its utter freedom from affectation or
sentimentality, embarrassed him by its unlikeness to all the attributes
he mentally classified as feminine. To look straight seemed to him
almost as unwomanly as to throw straight, and Susan would, doubtless, be
quite capable of performing either of these difficult feats. He liked
her fine brow under the short fringe, which he hated, and he liked the
arched bridge of her nose and the generous curve of her mouth. Yet had
he stopped to analyze her, he would probably have said that the woman
spirit in her was expressed through character rather than through
emotion--a manifestation disconcerting to one whose vision of her sex
was chiefly as the irresponsible creature of drama. The old
shackles--even the shackles of that drama whose mistress a