"You saw him after the opera?"
"Only for half a minute, at the door of my house. We only said a word or two. He whispered he had lost me--that I had killed him. Oh, I don't remember what he said. But we looked straight at each other. I didn't sleep all night, and when I lay awake I tried to think of the wonderful fact that I had made my debut, and that it wasn't a failure, at any rate. But I couldn't think about that, or about my career. I couldn't hold to anything but the look in his eyes and the fact that I was to see him to-day. Not that he said so. But we both knew. Why, we couldn't have lived if we hadn't seen each other to-day."
"And you did?"
"Oh, we did. He called me up on the telephone about two o'clock, and said he had waited as long as he could, and that he'd been walking the floor, not daring to ring till he was sure that I'd rested enough after last night. So I told him to come, and he must have been just around the corner, for he was there in a minute. I wanted him to come in and sit down, but he said he didn't believe a house could hold such audacity as his. So we went out on the street. It was cold and bleak. The Midway was a long, gray blankness. I felt afraid of it, actually. All the world looked forbidding to me--except just the little place where I walked with him. It was as if there were a little warm beautiful radius in which we could keep together, and live for each other, and comfort each other, and keep harm away."
"Oh, Marna! And you, with a career before you! What do you mean to do?"
"I don't know what to do. We don't either of us know what to do. He says he'll go mad with me on the stage, wearing myself out, the object of the jealousy of other women and of love-making from the men. He--says it's a profanation. I tried to tell him it couldn't be a profanation to serve art; but, Kate, he didn't seem to know what I meant. He has such different standards. He wanted to know what I was going to do when I was old. He said I'd have no real home, and no haven of love; and that I'd better be the queen of his home as long as I lived than to rule it a little while there on the stage and then--be forgotten. Oh, it isn't what he said that counts. All that sounds flat enough as I repeat it. It's the wonder of being with some one that loves you like that and of feeling that there are two of you who belong--"
"How do you know you belong?" asked Kate with sharp good sense. "Why, bright one, you've been swept off your feet by mere--forgive me--by mere sex."
That glint of the eyes which Kate called Celtic flashed from Marna.
"Mere sex!" she repeated. "Mere sex! You're not trying to belittle that, are you? Why, Kate, that's the beginning and the end of things. What I've always liked about you is that you look big facts in the face and aren't afraid of truth. Sex! Why, that's home and happiness and all a woman really cares for, isn't it?"
"No, it isn't all she cares for," declared Kate valiantly. "She cares for a great many other things. And when I said mere sex I was trying to put it politely. Is it really home and lifelong devotion that you two are thinking about, or are you just drunk with youth and--well, with infatuation?"