"Would it have been fair, Horace?"
"No," he said—a simple negative.
"You see that you do not want me—that you would find me more, far more, of a drag on your career than I was before—a force pulling back instead of merely a dead weight."
He was looking at her—was looking from behind his impenetrable mask. He looked for a long time, she now meeting his gaze and now glancing away. At last he said, with slow deliberateness: "I see that I came seeking a mistress. Whether I want her as a wife, I don't know. Whether she wants me as a husband—I don't know." He relapsed into thought which she did not interrupt.
When he rose to go, he did not see how she flushed and trembled, and fought down the longing to say the things that would have meant retreat.
"I feel," said he with a faint smile, "like a man who goes down to the pier thinking he is about to take an outing for the day, and finds that if he goes aboard he will be embarked for a life journey into new lands and will never come back. I never before really grasped what marriage means."
She had always been fascinated by his eyes, which seemed to her to contain the essence of all that attracted and thrilled and compelled her in the idea, man. As she stood touching the hand he extended, she had never felt his eyes so deeply; never before had there been in them this manly gentleness of respect and consideration. And her faltering courage took heart.
"I am going back to New York," he said. "I want to look about me."
She looked straight and calm; but, through her hand, he felt that she was vibrating like a struck, tense violin string. "Some men want a mistress when they marry," she went on, smiling-serious, "and some want a housekeeper, and some a parlor ornament, and some a mother for their children. But very few want a wife. And I"—she sighed. "I couldn't do anything at any of the other parts, unless I were also the wife."
"I understand—at last," he said. "Or rather, I begin to understand. You have thought it out. I haven't—and I must."