"I mean it altogether," he said earnestly. "I mean it without any—reservations at all. You must believe that because it's the—basis for everything else."
She repeated "everything else?" in clear interrogation; then dropped back rather suddenly into her former attitude. Everything else! What else was there to friendship but itself?
He turned back to the window. "I've come to ask you to, marry me, Mary, just the same. I couldn't be any good as a friend, couldn't take care of you and try to make you happy, unless in the eyes of the world I was your husband. But I wouldn't ask,—I promise you I wouldn't ask anything,—anything at all. You do understand, don't you? You'd be just as—sacred to me …"
Then he cried out in consternation at the sight of her, "Mary!
What is it?"
The tension had become too great, that was all. Her self-control, slackened by the momentarily held belief that it was not needed, had snapped.
"I understand well enough," she said. "You would say good night at my bedroom door and good morning at the breakfast table. I've read of arrangements like that in rather nasty-minded novels, but I didn't suppose they existed anywhere else. I can't think of an existence more degradingly sensual than that;—to go on for days and months and years being 'sacred' to a man; never satisfying the desires your nearness tortured him with—to say nothing of what you did with your own!
"But that such a thing should be offered to me because I'm too good to love a man honestly…. You see, I'm none of the things you think I am, Graham. Nor that you want me to be. Not white, not innocent. Not a 'good' woman even, let alone an angel. That's what makes it so—preposterous."
He had been staring at her, speechless, horrified. But at this it was as if he understood. "I ought not to have worried you to-day," he said, suddenly gentle. "I know how terribly overwrought you are. I meant—I only meant to make things easier. I'm going away now. I'll send Rush to you. He'll come at once. Do you mind being alone till then?"
She answered slowly and with an appearance of patient reasonableness, "It's not that. It's not what Rush calls shell-shock. There is many a shabby little experimental flirt who has managed to keep intact an-innocence which I don't possess. That is the simple-physiological truth."
Then, after a silence, with a gasp, "I'm not mad. But I think I shall be if you go on looking at me like that. Won't you please go?"