"I need a partner to share the rich man's burden!" he said, with a quizzical smile. "And I know from experience that you are the one partner in the world for me."
"No!" she said, her eyes half closed, her cheeks rather pale. "I—I'm not sure that I'm ready for marriage."
"Oh, don't let that stop you! Nobody is ever ready for birth, marriage, or death. We're just plunged in—doubts, hesitations, and all. You don't suppose any sane man or woman wants to take the plunge, do you? I know I don't. But since I've got to marry somebody, I've made up my mind to marry no one but you."
"At least you're quite frank," she said, with a rather trembling lip.
"Are you angry? Heaven knows it would be easier for me to use the stock phrases on which we were brought up and fed up. But you're a woman of the new age! And I'm proposing partnership to an equal, to a fellow worker—not to a goddess-drudge!"
They both rose from the settee.
"Surely," he said, wondering at her silence, "it isn't the Free Love philosophy that's in the way?"
"No, no!" she said, emphatically. "I thought I'd told you that in Paris."
She repeated that she was done with all that! She admitted that, for a time, Cornelia had won her over to what Bernard Shaw called the Love-Is-All school of fanatics. And, so she feared, she had actually believed in her own readiness to give up All for Love! But the hard knocks of the last two years had opened her eyes to the inadequacy as well as to the inexpediency of this philosophy. When the Hutchins Burleys, the Cornelia Coverts, the women with horn-rimmed spectacles, and their like—when these successively popped up to interfere with her purposes, she had realized that love, far from being all to her, was simply one of her heart's desires. She still held to the view that the love relation between two people should be subject to no other law than that of their own consciences. And she still hoped that society would be converted to this view, although she no longer had a mind to risk her soul's welfare in its behalf.
"You see, Robert, how fully I've come round to your opinion! If I'm to risk my salvation for anything, it must be for something bigger than the love chase."