"Two."
"Yes. Didn't they speak?"
"I want to see her. Damn it, Tarvrille!" I cried with sudden tears in my smarting eyes. "Let her send me away. This isn't—— Not treating us like human beings."
"Women," said Tarvrille and looked at his boot toes, "are different from men. You see, Stratton——"
He paused. "You always strike me, Stratton, as not realizing that women are weak things. We've got to take care of them. You don't seem to feel that as I do. Their moods—fluctuate—more than ours do. If you hold 'em to what they say in the same way you hold a man—it isn't fair...."
He halted as though he awaited my assent to that proposition.
"If you were to meet Mary now, you see, and if you were to say to her, come—come and we'll jump down Etna together, and you said it in the proper voice and with the proper force, she'd do it, Stratton. You know that. Any man knows a thing like that. And she wouldn't want to do it...."
"You mean that's why I can't see her."
"That's why you can't see her."
"Because we'd become—dramatic."