"When are you going to let my answer be your answer, and my decision your decision?"
"It's no trouble to ask," he impudently assured her. "You remember the man who
"Proposed forty thousand and ninety-six times,
—And each time, but the last, she said, 'No.'
You see the whole virtue of that man lay in his pertinacity."
After a moment's silence he added, in a voice out of which had gone all facetiousness even while it lingered in the words themselves, "There are a thousand reasons, Anne, why I can't give you up. I've forgotten nine hundred and ninety-nine of them but I remember one. I love you utterly."
Her eyes met his with direct gravity.
"But why, Morgan?" she demanded with a candid directness. "I'm the opposite in type of every one else you cultivate or care for. I'm really not your sort of person at all, you know."
"Perhaps," he said, "it's because you are the most thoroughbred woman I know, and I want to be proud of my wife. Perhaps it's merely that you're you."
"Thank you," she said simply. "It's a pity, Morgan dear, that I can love you in every way except the one way. I wish you'd pick out a girl really suited to you."
"By the 'every way except the one way,'" he interposed, "you mean platonically?"