"Then don't relinquish anything," she said. "It's all yours. Can't you believe that, John?"
He released her hands and sank back slackly in his chair. "Victory!" he said, a note of inextinguishable irony in his voice. "A victory I'd have given five years of my life for last March. Yet I could go on winning them—a whole succession of them—and they could lead me to nothing but disaster."
She left him abruptly and the next moment he heard her fling herself down upon his bed. When he rose and disengaged himself from his rug, she said, over an irrepressible sob or two, that he wasn't to mind nor come to her. She wasn't going to cry-not more than a minute.
He came, nevertheless, settled himself on the edge of the bed and took possession of her hands again.
"I wouldn't have told you all this," he said—"for you don't need any lessons in arithmetic, child—if I dared trust myself to remember, after the other thing had come back. Now I'm committed—don't you see?—not to play the fool, tragically or ludicrously, as the case might be, trying to dispute the inevitable. And I shall contrive to keep a lot, my dear. More than you think."
Later, the evening of that same day, he asked her what was in the letter that had provoked their talk. Did they want her back in Chicago for rehearsals or consultations? Because if they did there was no reason in the world why she should not go. At the rate at which he was gaining strength there would not be the slightest reason—he gave her his professional word of honor—why she should not go back in a day or two.
"I should have to go back," she said, "if I were going to sing March's opera. There is such a lot of work about a new production that there would be no time to spare."
"But," he asked, "isn't March's opera precisely what you are going to sing?"
"No," she said rebelliously. "It's not. There wasn't anything in the contract about that. I'll carry out the contract this summer. I'll keep my word and yours, since that is what you want me to do. But I won't sing 'Dolores' for anybody."
He did not press her for the reason.