He owned that it didn't. "But when I'm in love with a woman—this isn't a fact I'm proud of, but it's true—I'm jealous of her. Not of other men alone, though I'm that, too, but jealous of everything. I want to be all around her. I want to be everything to her. I want her to think there's nobody like me; that nobody else could be right and I be wrong. And I want to be able to think the same of her. I want her to hide, from me, the things about herself that I wouldn't like. When I ask her what she thinks about something, I want her to say—what I want her to think. I know what I want her to think, and if she doesn't say it she hurts my feelings."
He thought it over a bit longer and then went on. "No, I've been in love with women I could suspect of anything. Women I thought were lying to me, cheating me; women I've hated; women I've known hated me. But I've never been in love with a woman who was my friend. I'd never figured it out before, but it's so."
In the process of figuring it out he'd more or less forgotten Rose. He had been tramping along communing with his pipe; thinking aloud. If he'd been watching her face he wouldn't have gone so far.
"Well, if it's like that," she said, and the quality of her voice drew his full attention instantly—"if love has to be like that, then the game doesn't seem worth going on with. You can't live with it, and you can't live—without it." Her voice dropped a little, but gained in intensity. "At least I can't. I don't believe I can." She stopped and faced him. "What can one do?" she demanded. "Wait, I suppose you'll say, till you're fifty. Well, you're fifty, and the thing can still torment you; spring on you when you aren't looking; twist you about." She turned away with a despairing gesture and stood gazing out, tear-blinded, over the little valley the hilltop they had reached commanded.
"You want to remember this," he said at last. "I've been talking about myself. I haven't even pretended to guess for more than nine of those twelve men. That leaves three who are, I am pretty sure, different. I might have been different myself, a little anyway, if I'd got a different sort of start. If my first love-affair had been an altogether different thing. If it had been the kind that gave me a home and kids. So you don't want to take what I've said for anything more than just the truth about me. And I'm not, thank God, a fair sample."
He stood behind her, miserably helpless to say or do anything to comfort her. An instinct told him she didn't want his hands on her just then, and he couldn't unsay the things he had told her any further than he had already.
Presently she turned back to him, slid her hand inside his arm, and started down the road with him. "My love-affair brought me a home and—kids," she said. "There are two of them—twins—a year and a half old now; and I went off and left them; left him. And all I did it for was to make myself over, into somebody he could be friends with, instead of just—as I said then—his mistress. I'd never known a woman then who was a man's mistress, really, and I didn't see why he should be so angry over my using the word. I thought it was fair enough. And the day I left his house I came to you and got a job in the chorus in The Girl Up-stairs. I thought that by earning my own way, building a life that he didn't—surround, as you say—I could win his friendship. And have his love besides. I don't suppose you would have believed there could be such a fool in the world as I was to do that."
He took a while digesting this truly amazing statement of hers, a half-mile perhaps of steady silent tramping. But at last he said, "No, I wouldn't call you a fool. I call a fool a person who thinks he can get something for nothing. You didn't think that. You were willing to pay—a heavy price it must have been, too—for what you wanted. And I've an idea, you know, that you never really pay without getting something; though you don't always get what you expect. You've got something now. A knowledge of what you can do; of what you are worth; and I don't believe you'd trade it for what you had the day before you came to me for a job."
"I don't know," she said raggedly. "Perhaps ..." A sob clutched at her throat and she did not try to conclude the sentence.
"As to whether you did right or wrong in leaving him," he went on, "you've got to figure it this way. It isn't fair to say, 'Knowing what I know now and being what I am now, but in the situation I was in then, I'd have done differently.' The thing you've got to take into account is, being what you were then, suppose you hadn't gone? You thought then that you were just his mistress, not knowing what a real mistress was like; and you thought that by going away you could make yourself his friend. You thought that was your great chance. Well, you couldn't have stayed without feeling that you had thrown away your chance; without knowing that you'd had your big thing to do and had been afraid to do it. And that knowledge would have gone a long way toward making you the thing you thought you were.