She waited a moment before answering. "If we should fail this time, it would be the end, wouldn't it?" she said.
"But we can't fail!" he protested. He was strong in his assurance once more; did not her question imply that she loved him?
"We failed before, and we were younger and more adaptable."
"But now we understand each other."
"Do we?" she said, her eyes gravely upon him.
"How can you ask that!"
"Because so much depends on our seeing the truth exactly. The rest of our lives is at stake."
"Yes. I can't go on without you. Can you go on without me?"
"Each of us," she replied, "can go on without the other. I can paint pictures; you can make money. The question is, what will we mean to each other if we go on together? We aren't children any more, Horace. We are a man and a woman full grown, experienced, unable to blind ourselves even in our follies. And we aren't simply rushing into an episode of passion that will rage and die out. If it were merely that, I shouldn't be asking you and myself questions. When the end came, we could resume our separate lives; and, even if our experience had cost us dear instead of helping us, still we could recover, would in time be stronger and better for having had it. But you offer me your whole self, your whole life, and you ask me to give you mine. You ask me to marry you."
He did not understand this; woman meant to him only sex, and the difference between love and passion was a marriage ceremony. He felt that in what she said there lurked traces of the immorality of the woman who tries to think for herself instead of properly selecting a proper man and letting him do the thinking for both. "I love you," said he, "and there's the whole story. Love doesn't reason; it feels."