"I tell you what, Jeany, if we get that bridge built we'll have to give Robert some incentive. We'll let him meet Dora before he does it instead of after. It'll make her better, too, eliminate any possibility of her loving him for anything but himself. How does that strike you? She can't fall in love with his achievements, if he hasn't any."
"But that isn't the way we've mapped it out. Robert was going to get it all done and offer it to her. It's just what he would do. If you go and change it round you make him another kind of man. Maybe that other kind of man wouldn't get the bridge——" Jean broke off suddenly.
"The bridge built at all. Is that what you mean?" Herrick finished for her.
"Yes, I suppose I do. You see——" Jean frowned in her effort to get exactly the right words. It seemed somehow very important that she should get them just right, "The way we have it fixed now, Robert is one kind of man and Dora is one kind of girl, and they're going to be awfully happy. But if you change him she wouldn't be happy with that kind of man. He'd be just the kind that would want to trail her through the jungle after him. You will have to change her, too."
"Rubbish, Jean. That's the psychology of a girl of sixteen. Do you suppose love depends on whether a man builds a bridge or not?"
"That isn't the point, Begee, and it's not the same thing at all. Whether he built the bridge or not, under those difficult conditions, depends on the man he is."
"Oh, Jean, you're a baby. Carrying out that logic then, if I never finish the novel, I am another man. And you'll have to get made all over yourself. Would I be a different man to you?"
Jean looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. Then she raised her eyes to Herrick's:
"Yes. You would be different."
"Why? Why would not finishing the novel make me any different?"