If we could be happy now you might reach the point where you
wouldn't care any more. Then you see I wouldn't be remorseful thinking
that we had never known happiness."

"What logic!" he exclaimed. "Do you mean to say you wouldn't care any
more?"

"Oh, I'd care, but not in the same way. Don't you see, Eugene, I would
have the satisfaction of knowing that even if we did separate you had
had the best of me."

It seemed astounding to Eugene that she should talk in this way--reason
this way. What a curious, sacrificial, fatalistic turn of mind. Could a
young, beautiful, talented girl really be like this? Would anybody on
earth really believe it if they knew? He looked at her and shook his
head sorrowfully.

"To think that the quintessence of life should not stay with us always."
He sighed.

"No, honey boy," she replied, "you want too much. You think you want it
to stay, but you don't. You want it to go. You wouldn't be satisfied to
live with me always, I know it. Take what the gods provide and have no
regrets. Refuse to think; you can, you know."

Eugene gathered her up in his arms. He kissed her over and over,
forgetting in her embrace all the loves he had ever known. She yielded
herself to him gladly, joyously, telling him over and over that it made
her happy.

"If you could only see how nice you are to me you wouldn't wonder," she
explained.

He concluded she was the most wonderful being he had ever known. No
woman had ever revealed herself to him so unselfishly in love. No woman
he had ever known appeared to have the courage and the insight to go
thus simply and directly to what she desired. To hear an artist of her
power, a girl of her beauty, discussing calmly whether she should
sacrifice her virtue to love; whether marriage in the customary form was
good for her art; whether she should take him now when they were young
or bow to the conventions and let youth pass, was enough to shock his
still trammelled soul. For after all, and despite his desire for
personal freedom, his intellectual doubts and mental exceptions, he
still had a profound reverence for a home such as that maintained by
Jotham Blue and his wife, and for its results in the form of normal,
healthy, dutiful children. Nature had no doubt attained to this standard
through a long series of difficulties and experiments, and she would not
readily relinquish it. Was it really necessary to abandon it entirely?
Did he want to see a world in which a wo