white and drawn.
"I feel sometimes as if I were going mad! Oh, it is so terrible to be
a woman!" The woman looked down at her. "Now I hear he likes another
woman. I don't know who she is, but they say she is so clever, and
writes. Oh, it is so terrible, I can't bear it."

The woman leaned her elbow against the mantelpiece, and her face against
her hand. She looked down into the fire. Then she turned and looked at
the younger woman. "Yes," she said, "it is a very terrible thing to be a
woman." She was silent. She said with some difficulty: "Are you sure you
love him? Are you sure it is not only the feeling a young girl has for
an older man who is celebrated, and of whom every one is talking?"

"I have been nearly mad. I haven't slept for weeks!" She knit her little
hands together, till the jewelled rings almost cut into the fingers. "He
is everything to me; there is nothing else in the world. You, who are so
great, and strong, and clever, and who care only for your work, and for
men as your friends, you cannot understand what it is when one person is
everything to you, when there is nothing else in the world!"

"And what do you want me to do?"

"Oh, I don't know!" She looked up. "A woman knows what she can do. Don't
tell him that I love him." She looked up again. "Just say something to
him. Oh, it's so terrible to be a woman; I can't do anything. You won't
tell him exactly that I love him? That's the thing that makes a man hate
a woman, if you tell it him plainly."

"If I speak to him I must speak openly. He is my friend. I cannot fence
with him. I have never fenced with him in my own affairs." She moved as
though she were going away from the fireplace, then she turned and said:
"Have you thought of what love is between a man and a woman when it
means marriage? That long, long life together, day after day, stripped
of all romance and distance, living face to face: seeing each other as
a man sees his own soul? Do you realize that the end of marriage is to
make the man and woman stronger than they were; and that if you cannot,
when you are an old man and woman and sit by the fire, say, 'Life has
been a braver and a freer thing for us, because we passed it hand in
hand, than if we had passed through it alone,' it has failed? Do you
care for him enough to live for him, not tomorrow, but when he is an
old, faded man, and you an old, faded woman? Can you forgive him his
sins and his weaknesses, when they hurt you most? If