l moved slowly away.

"And I can't get up without help," he added querulously.

Desire stopped. "You can," she said.

"I can't. Not after that dreadful climb."

"Then I shall wait until you are ready. But we do not need to continue
this conversation."

The professor sighed. "This," he said, "is what comes of taking a woman
at her word."

"What?"

"I might have known," he went on guilefully, "that you didn't really
mean it. No young girl would."

"Mean what?"

"That you had no room in your scheme of things for ordinary marriage.
Of course you were talking nonsense. I beg your pardon."

"Will you kindly explain what you mean!"

"I will if you will sit down so that I may talk to you on my own level.
You see, your determination not to marry struck me very much at the
time because it voiced my own--er--determination also. I said to
myself, 'Here are two people sufficiently original to wish to escape
the common lot.' I thought about it a great deal. And then an idea
came. It was, I admit, the inspiration of a moment. But it grew. It
certainly grew."

Desire sat down again and folded her hands over her knees.

"I will listen."

"It is very simple," he hastened to explain. "Simplicity is, I think,
the keynote of all true inspiration. An idea comes, and we are filled
with amazement that we have so long ignored the obvious. Take our case.
Here are we two, strongly of one mind and wanting the same thing. A
perfectly feasible way of getting that thing occurs to me. Yet when I
suggest this way you jump up and rush away."

"I haven't rushed yet."

"No. But you were going to. And all because you cannot be logical. No
woman can."

His listener brushed this away with a gesture of impatience.

"I can prove it," went on the wily one. "You object to marriage, yet
you covet the freedom marriage gives. Now what is the logical result of
that? The logical result is fear--fear that some day you may want
freedom so badly that you will marry in order to get it."

"It is not--I won't."

"I knew you would not admit it. But it is true all the same. The other
night when you said 'marriage is hideous,' I saw fear in your eyes.
There is fear in your eyes now."

The girl dropped her eyes and raised them again instantly. Her slanting
eyebrows frowned.

"Nevertheless," she said, "I shall not marry."

"But you will, as an honest person, admit the other part of the
proposition--that you want something at least of what marriag