Take a dozen sound, normal, healthy men and if you could find
out the truth about them, which it would be pretty hard to do, you'd
find immense differences in their wants, habits, feelings; in the way
things _took_ them. But I've a notion that nine out of the dozen, if you
could get down to the actual bedrock facts about them, would own up that
if they were in love with a woman--really, you know, all the way--they
wouldn't want her for a partner, and wouldn't be able to see her as a
friend. That's just a guess, of course. But there's one thing I know,
and that is that I couldn't."

She gave a little shiver. "_Oh_, what a mess it is!" she said. "What a
perfectly hopeless blunder it is!" She slid down from the wall. "Come;
let's walk."

He fell in beside her and they tramped sturdily along for a while in
silence. At last she said, "Can you tell me why? Suppose there hadn't
been any one else with me; suppose I'd felt toward you the way you did
toward me, then; why couldn't you have gone on being my friend and
partner as well as my lover? You'd have known I was worth it; have known
I understood the things you were interested in and--yes, and was able to
help you to work them out. Why would all that have had to go?"

"Oh, I don't know that I can explain it," he said. "But I don't think
I'd call it a blunder that a strip of spring steel can't bend in your
fingers like copper and still go on being a spring. You see, a man
wants his work and then he wants something that isn't his work; that's
altogether apart from his work; doesn't remind him of it. Love's about
as far away as anything he can get. So that the notion of our working
ourselves half to death over the same job, and then going home
together ..."

"Yes," she admitted. "I can see that. But that doesn't cover
friendship."

He owned that it didn't. "But when I'm in love with a woman--this isn't
a fact I'm proud of, but it's true--I'm jealous of her. Not of other
men alone, though I'm that, too, but jealous of everything. I want to be
all around her. I want to be everything to her. I want her to think
there's nobody like me; that nobody else could be right and I be wrong.
And I want to be able to think the same of her. I want her to hide, from
me, the things about herself that I wouldn't like. When I ask her what
she thinks about something, I want her to say--what I want her to think.
I know what I want her to think, and if she doesn't say it she hurts my
feelings."