"Humphrey, I want to talk to you very seriously. I want to know whether you will give up journalism."
He remembered her hint of this far back in the months when she had first allowed him to tell her of his love. He had thought the danger was past, but now she came to him, with a deliberate, frontal attack on the very stronghold of his existence.
"Give up journalism!" he echoed. "What for?"
All the weapons of her sex were at her command. She might have said, "For me"; she might have smiled and enticed and cajoled. But she brushed these weapons aside disdainfully. Hers was the earnest business of putting Humphrey to the test.
"Because I think you and I will never be happy together if you do not. Because, if I marry you (he noticed she did not say, 'When I marry you'), I should not want your work to occupy a larger place in our lives than myself. Because I hate your work, and I think you can do better things. Those are my reasons."
He stood up and walked to the window, looking out on the trees that made an avenue of the quiet road. A man with a green baize covered tray on his head came round the corner, swinging a bell up and down.
"Well?" she said.
"Oh but look here, Elizabeth," he began, "you spring something like this on me suddenly, and expect me to answer at once...."
"Oh, no! you can have time to think it over. You've had nearly a year, you know."