"Oh, I've reasoned it all out, night after night after night, fought it out, torn it out, that he probably really and truly did love me quite a good deal—in his own way—when there wasn't anything else to do. But how can it possibly content a woman to have a man love her as well as he knows how—if it isn't as well as she knows how? We won't talk about—Aleck Reese's morals," she finished abruptly. "Fickleness, selfishness, neglect, even infidelity itself, are such purely minor, incidental data of the one big, incurably rotten and distasteful fact that—such and such a man is stupid in the affections."
With growing weakness she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes.
For an anxious moment Drew sat and watched her. "Is that all?" he asked at last.
She opened her eyes in surprise. "Why, yes," she said, "that's all—that is, it's all if you understand. I'm not complaining because Aleck Reese didn't love me, but because, loving me, he wasn't intelligent enough to be true to me. You do understand, don't you? You understand that it wasn't because he didn't pay his love bills, but because he didn't know enough to pay them. He took my loyalty without paying for it with his; he took my devotion, my tenderness, my patience, without ever, ever making any adequate return. Any girl ought to be able to tell in six months whether her lover is using her affection rightly, whether he is taking her affection and investing it with his toward their mutual happiness and home. Aleck invested nothing. He just took all my love that he could grab and squandered it on himself—always and forever on himself. A girl, I say, ought to be able to tell in six months. But I am very stupid. It has taken me three years."
"Well, what do you want me to do?" Drew asked a bit quizzically.
"I want you to advise me," she said.
"Advise you—what?" persisted Drew.
The first real flicker of comedy flamed in the girl's face. Her white cheeks pinked and dimpled. "Why, advise me to—marry you!" she announced. "well, why not?" She fairly hurled the three-word bridge across the sudden, awful chasm of silence that yawned before her.
Drew's addled mind caught the phrase dully and turned it over and over without attempting to cross on it. "Well, why not? Well, why not?" he kept repeating. His discomfiture filled the girl with hysterical delight, and she came and perched herself opposite him on the farther end of his desk and smiled at him.
"It seems to me perfectly simple," she argued. "Without any doubt or question you certainly are the kind of man whom I should like to marry. You are true and loyal and generous and rugged about things. And you like the things that I like. And I like the people that you like. And, most of anything in the world, you are clever in the affections. You are heart-wise as well as head-wise. Why, even in the very littlest, silliest thing that could possibly matter, you wouldn't—for instance—remember George Washington's birthday and forget mine. And you wouldn't go away on a lark and leave me if I was sick, any more than you'd blow out the gas. And you wouldn't—hurt me about—other women—any more than you'd eat with your knife." Impulsively she reached over and patted his hand with the tips of her fingers. "As far as I can see," she teased, "there's absolutely no fault in you that matters to me except that I don't happen to love you."