The girl threw him a quick glance, and went on hesitatingly:
“I don’t suppose we could marry and each of us go on holding our jobs?”
Mr. Corey considered, stroking his black mustache with a thoughtful thumb and finger.
“Well,” he said slowly, “what do you gain? If you went on working, you’d find it difficult to keep house; you’d have to live in a boarding-house. And that isn’t homemaking. And then, Miss Sturgis, there’s the, question of children. What would you do about them? You wouldn’t care to have a child as long as you came downtown to an office every day.... No, I wouldn’t advise it. If you love your young man well enough, I would urge you to marry him.”
“I don’t!” Jeannette said to herself violently on her way home.
But did she? Almost with the denial, she began to wonder.
That night when Roy came to see her and asked her again for the thousandth time to name the day, she took his face between her hands and kissed him tenderly, folded his head against her breast, and with arms tight about him, pressed her lips again and again to his unruly hair.
Later, when he had gone and she was alone, she dropped upon her knees before the old davenport where they had been sitting, and wept.
It was the end of the struggle. She told no one for a long time, but in her mind she knew she would never marry him. Her work was too precious to her; her independence too dear; to give them up was demanding of her more than she had the strength to give.
END OF BOOK I