"No, no," she cried. "Don't hypnotize me, Ray! Leave me my judgment, leave me my reason. If it's a partnership we're to enter into, I ought to know the terms."
"The terms, Kate? Why, I'll love you as long as I live; I'll treasure you as the most precious thing in all the world."
"And the winds of heaven shall not be allowed to visit my cheek too roughly," she managed to say tantalizingly.
He paused, perplexed.
"I know I bewilder you, dear man," she said. "But this is the point: I don't want to be protected. I mean I don't want to be made dependent; I don't want my interpretations of life at second-hand. I object to having life filter through anybody else to me; I want it, you see, on my own account."
"Why, Kate!" It wasn't precisely a protest. He seemed rather to reproach her for hindering the onward sweep of their happiness--for opposing him with her ideas when they might together have attained a beautiful emotional climax.
"I couldn't stand it," she went on, lifting her eyes to his, "to be given permission to do this, that, or the other thing; or to be put on an allowance; or made to ask a favor--"
He sank down in his chair and folded across his breast the arms whose embrace she had not claimed.
"You seem to mean," he said, "that you don't want to be a wife. You prefer your independence to love."
"I want both," Kate declared, rising and standing before him. "I want the most glorious and abounding love woman ever had. I want so much of it that it never could be computed or measured--so much it will lift me up above anything that I now am or that I know, and make me stronger and freer and braver."