igh upon her mind. She
had not weakened in her resolve not to give way, for reflection had only
made her more bitterly certain that, if she gave way, it would be to her
own wish and not to his. But she had determined that there was no reason
why he should suffer if her reticence were the cause of his suffering.
Therefore, although she found it painful, she spoke:

"You asked me if I had changed my mind about you, Ralph," she said. "I
think there's only one thing. When you asked me to marry you, I don't
think you meant it. That made me angry--for the moment. Before, you'd
always spoken the truth."

Ralph's book slid down upon his knee and fell upon the floor. He rested
his forehead on his hand and looked into the fire. He was trying to
recall the exact words in which he had made his proposal to Mary.

"I never said I loved you," he said at last.

She winced; but she respected him for saying what he did, for this,
after all, was a fragment of the truth which she had vowed to live by.

"And to me marriage without love doesn't seem worth while," she said.

"Well, Mary, I'm not going to press you," he said. "I see you don't want
to marry me. But love--don't we all talk a great deal of nonsense about
it? What does one mean? I believe I care for you more genuinely than
nine men out of ten care for the women they're in love with. It's only a
story one makes up in one's mind about another person, and one knows all
the time it isn't true. Of course one knows; why, one's always taking
care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to see them too
often, or to be alone with them for too long together. It's a pleasant
illusion, but if you're thinking of the risks of marriage, it seems to
me that the risk of marrying a person you're in love with is something
colossal."

"I don't believe a word of that, and what's more you don't, either,"
she replied with anger. "However, we don't agree; I only wanted you to
understand." She shifted her position, as if she were about to go. An
instinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralph rise
at this point and begin pacing up and down the nearly empty kitchen,
checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to open it and step
out into the garden. A moralist might have said that at this point his
mind should have been full of self-reproach for the suffering he had
caused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with the confused
impotent anger of one who finds h