Emily was grateful to him for proposing to her just then. And her courage was so impaired by her depression that she could not summarily reject a chance to settle herself for life in the way that is usually called “well.” “Haven’t I been making a mistake?” she had been saying to herself all that day—and in vaguer form on many preceding days. “Is the game worth the struggle? Freedom and independence haven’t brought me happiness. Wasn’t George right, after all? Why should I expect so much in a man, expect so much from life?” It seemed to her at the moment that she had better have stopped thinking, had better have cast aside her ideals of self-respect and pride, and have sunk with Marlowe. “And Edgar would let me alone. Why not marry him?”
She evaded his proposal by teasing him about his flight from her two years before—“Only two years,” she thought. “How full and swift life is, if one keeps in midstream.”
“Don’t talk about that, Emmy, please,” begged Edgar humbly. “I don’t need any reminder that I once had a chance and threw it away.”
“But you didn’t have a chance,” replied Emily.
“No, I suppose not. I suppose you wouldn’t have had me, if it had come to the point.”
“I don’t mean that. I’d have had you, but you wouldn’t, couldn’t, have had me. The I of those days and the I of to-day aren’t at all the same person. If I’d married you then, there would have been one kind of a me. As it is, there is a different kind of a me, as different as—as the limits of life permit.”
“What has done it—love?” he asked.
“Chiefly freedom. Freedom!” Her sensitive face was suddenly all in a glow.
“I know I’m not up to you, Emily,” he said. “But——”
“Let’s not talk about it, Edgar. Why spoil our evening?”