not so clearly defined. We did not
meet every morning for fear that her early rising should seem too
punctual to be no more than a chance impulse, nor did we go to the same
place. But there stands out very clearly a conversation in a different
mood. We had met at the sham ruins at the far end of the great
shrubbery, a huge shattered Corinthian portico of rather damaged stucco
giving wide views of the hills towards Alfridsham between its three
erect pillars, and affording a dry seat upon its fallen ones. It was an
overcast morning, I remember probably the hour was earlier; a kind of
twilight clearness made the world seem strange and the bushes and trees
between us and the house very heavy and still and dark. And we were at
cross purpose, for now it was becoming clear to me that Mary did not
mean to marry me, that she dreaded making any promise to me for the
future, that all the heroic common cause I wanted with her, was quite
alien to her dreams.

"But Mary," I said looking at her colorless delicate face, "don't you
love me? Don't you want me?"

"You know I love you, Stevenage," she said. "You know."

"But if two people love one another, they want to be always together,
they want to belong to each other."

She looked at me with her face very intent upon her meaning.
"Stevenage," she said after one of those steadfast pauses of hers, "I
want to belong to myself."

"Naturally," I said with an air of disposing of an argument, and then
paused.

"Why should one have to tie oneself always to one other human being?"
she asked. "Why must it be like that?"

I do not remember how I tried to meet this extraordinary idea. "One
loves," I may have said. The subtle scepticisms of her mind went
altogether beyond my habits of thinking; it had never occurred to me
that there was any other way of living except in these voluntary and
involuntary mutual servitudes in which men and women live and die. "If
you love me," I urged, "if you love me---- I want nothing better in all
my life but to love and serve and keep you and make you happy."

She surveyed me and weighed my words against her own.

"I love meeting you," she said. "I love your going because it means
that afterwards you will come again. I love this--this slipping out to
you. But up there, there is a room in the house that is _my_
place--me--my own. Nobody follows me there. I want to go on living,
Stevenage, just as I am living now. I don't want to become someone's
certain