be
carried into the practical world. I love you. I do not pretend that it
is in any high, superhuman sense; I do not say that I should like you as
well if you were ugly and deformed, or that I should continue to prize
you whatever your treatment of me might be, or to love you though
you were a spirit without any body at all. That is sentimentality for
beardless boys. Every one not a mere child (and you are not a child,
except in years) knows what love between a man and a woman means. I love
you with that love. I should not have believed it possible that I
could have brought myself twice to ask of any woman to be my wife, more
especially one without wealth, without position, and who--"

"Yes--go on. Do not grow sorry for me. Say what you were going to--'who
has put herself into my power, and who has lost the right of meeting me
on equal terms.' Say what you think. At least we two may speak the truth
to one another."

Then she added after a pause:

"I believe you do love me, as much as you possibly could love anything;
and I believe that when you ask me to marry you you are performing the
most generous act you ever have performed in the course of your life, or
ever will; but, at the same time, if I had required your generosity, it
would not have been shown me. If, when I got your letter a month
ago, hinting at your willingness to marry me, I had at once written,
imploring you to come, you would have read the letter. 'Poor little
devil!' you would have said, and tore it up. The next week you would
have sailed for Europe, and have sent me a check for a hundred and fifty
pounds (which I would have thrown in the fire), and I would have heard
no more of you."

The stranger smiled.

"But because I declined your proposal, and wrote that in three weeks
I should be married to another, then what you call love woke up. Your
man's love is a child's love for butterflies. You follow till you have
the thing, and break it. If you have broken one wing, and the thing
flies still, then you love it more than ever, and follow till you break
both; then you are satisfied when it lies still on the ground."

"You are profoundly wise in the ways of the world; you have seen far
into life," he said.

He might as well have sneered at the firelight.

"I have seen enough to tell me that you love me because you cannot bear
to be resisted, and want to master me. You liked me at first because
I treated you and all men with indifference. You reso