"You must give me the right to take care of you."
"Because it's a duty that no one else would assume. That's what it comes to, isn't it?"
"I repeat that I don't want to discuss it—"
"You must let me point out that some amount of discussion is needed. If we didn't have it before marriage, we should have it afterward, when it would be worse. You won't think I'm boasting if I say that I think my vision is a little keener than yours, and that I see what you'd be doing more clearly than you do yourself. You know me—or you think you know me—as a guilty woman, homeless, penniless, and without a friend in the world. You don't want to leave me to my fate, and there's no way of helping me but one. That way you're prepared to take, cost what it will. I admire you for it; I thank you for it; I know you would do it like a man. But it's just because you would do it like a man—because you are doing it like a man—that your kindness is far more cruel than scorn. No woman, not the weakest, not the worst, among us, would consent to be taken as you're offering to take me. A man might bring himself to accept that kind of pity; but a woman—never! You said just now that you had come to offer me—what you had to offer; but surely I'm not fallen so low as to have to take it."
"I said I offered you my name and all that goes with it. I would try to tell you what it is, only that I find something in our relative positions transcending words. But since you need words—since apparently you prefer plainness of speech—I'll tell you something: I saw Bienville this morning."
She looked up with a new expression, verging on that of curiosity.
"And—?"
"Since then," he continued, "I've become even more deeply conscious than I was before of the ineradicable nature of what I feel for you."
"Ah?"
"I've come to see that, whatever may have happened, whatever you may be, I want you as my wife."