"Well, that's what your love would do for me," broke in McCrea. "That's what the love of a good woman is expected to do for a man."
"Of course," cried Kate; "but is that what the love of a good man is expected to do for a woman? Or is it expected to reconcile her to obscurity, to the dimming of her personality, and to the endless petty sacrifices that ought to shame her--and don't--those immoral sacrifices about which she has contrived to throw so many deceiving, iridescent mists of religion? Oh, yes, we are hypnotized into our foolish state of dependence easily enough! I know that. The mating instinct drugs us. I suppose the unborn generations reach out their shadowy multitudinous hands and drag us to our destiny!"
"What a woman you are! How you put things!" He tried but failed to keep the offended look from his face, and Kate knew perfectly well how hard he was striving not to think her indelicate. But she went on regardlessly.
"You think that's the very thing I ought to want to be my destiny? Well, perhaps I do. I want children--of course, I want them."
She stopped for a moment because she saw him flushing with embarrassment. Yet she couldn't apologize, and, anyway, an apology would avail nothing. If he thought her unwomanly because she talked about her woman's life,--the very life to which he was inviting her,--nothing she could say would change his mind. It wasn't a case for argument. She walked over to the fire and warmed her nervous hands at it.
"I'm sorry, Ray," she said finally.
"Sorry?"
"Sorry that I'm not the tender, trusting, maiden-creature who could fall trembling in your arms and love you forever, no matter what you did, and lie to you and for you the way good wives do. But I'm not--and, oh, I wish I were--or else--"
"Yes, Kate--what?"
"Or else that you were the kind of a man I need, the mate I'm looking for!"