"Louise won't do that," she said. "I sometimes think that her work is more to her than anything else in life. I suppose you two will find a way out of it, somehow."
"There is only one way, and Louise will have to make up her mind to it," John declared steadfastly. "However, my time hasn't come just yet. Until it comes, I must make the best of things. Tell me more about your own love-affairs, Sophy."
"It isn't a love-affair at all!" she exclaimed, almost indignantly.
"Why, I am sorry. Your prospective alliance, then, shall I call it?"
"Oh, it isn't interesting," she said. "It's just a young man in Bath. He is a lawyer and moderately well off. He has wanted me to marry him for years. He was a friend of my brother's. Lately he has been bothering a little more than usual—in fact, I suppose I have received what might be called an ultimatum. He came up yesterday, and I went out with him last night. He has gone back to Bath this morning, and I have promised to let him know in a month. I think that is why I went out to Waterloo Bridge in a mackintosh and got wet."
"Do you like him?" John asked practically.
"I like him, I suppose," Sophy sighed. "That's the worst of it. If I didn't like him, there might be some chance. I can't realize myself ever doing more than liking him in a mild sort of way; and if he expected more, as of course he would, then I should probably hate him. He tried to kiss me on the way to the station and I nearly scratched him. That isn't like me, you know. I rather like being kissed sometimes."
John buried himself in the wine-list.
"Well," he admitted, "it doesn't sound very hopeful. I'm no sort of judge in these matters, but I have heard lots of people say that one gets on all right after marriage without caring very much before. You don't seem to have a very comfortable life now, do you?"
"Comfortable? No, but I am free," Sophy replied quickly. "I can come in and go out when I please, choose my own friends, give my kisses to whom I please. Marriage—the sort of marriage mine would be—is slavery, and nothing else. What I am afraid of," she went on, "is that when I was down in that highly respectable old city, sitting all day in a respectable little villa, with two servants to order about and housekeeping-books to keep, I should feel the old pull come over me, and some day I should chuck it all and come back here to play around under the lights. It's rather fine to be here, you know—to be in the atmosphere, even if the lime-light misses one."