career, not now, not for years to come."

"No," he said mechanically.

"We are two great idealists, for that is what you have made me, Ben.
Before I was always laughing, and I believed in nothing. I despised even
what my sacrifice had won. Now, when I am with you, I remain in a
revery, and I am happy--happy with the happiness of things I cannot
understand. To-night, by your side, it seems to me I have never felt the
night before or known the mystery of the silent, faint hours. You have
made me feel the loneliness of the human soul, and that impulse it must
have before these things that are beyond us, that surround us, dominate
us, to cling almost in terror to another soul. You have so completely
made me over that it is as though you had created me yourself. I am
thirty-five. I have known everything else but what you have awakened in
me, and because I have this knowledge and this hunger I can see clearer
what we must do. You and I are a little romanesque, but remember that
even a great love may tire and grow stale, and that is what I won't
have, what must not be." Her voice had risen with the intensity of her
mood. She said more solemnly: "You are afraid of other men, of other
moods of mine--you have no reason. This love which comes to some as the
awakening of life is to me the end of all things. If anything should
wound it or belittle it, I should not survive it."

She continued to speak, in a low unvarying voice. He felt his mind clear
and his doubts dissipate, and impatiently he waited for her to end, to
show her that his weakness of the moment was gone and that he was still
the man of big vision who had awakened her.

"There are people who can put in order their love as they put in order
their house. We are not of that kind, Ben. I am a woman who has lived on
sensations. You, too, are a dreamer and a poet at the bottom. If I
should give up the opera and become to you simply a housewife, if there
was no longer any difficulty in our having each other, you would still
love me--yes, because you are loyal--but the romanticism, the mystery,
the longing we both need would vanish. Oh, I know. Well, you and I, we
are the same. We can only live on a great passion, and to have fierce,
unutterable joys we must suffer also--the suffering of separation. Do
you understand?"

"Yes, I do."

"That is why I shall never give up my career. That is why I can bear
the sadness of leaving you. I want you to be proud of me, Ben. I want