"Your last?" she repeated vaguely. "Your last?"
He nodded and swallowed in his throat. "Shall I tell you why?"
"Yes, tell me why," she said, and stared at the ship's boat, lashed to the side.
"I've told you about myself," he blurted out roughly, "and my family, and all that. It can't be helped—now. We look at things differently. A man either wants to be an attaché fooling around Baden, or he doesn't. I don't, that's all. And I go bad in offices. And I won't take money from them—or anybody. This suits me well enough. Probably I'm not ambitious."
"Then if it suits you," Molly began, but he put his hand over hers.
"It doesn't suit me to love any woman as much as I've loved you since Buenos Ayres," he said, "and feel that to get her I must give up this and settle down into a smelly office. It doesn't suit me to find that life is just hell without her, but to know that if I know anything about myself I couldn't live any other way but this, and that no decent man could ask a woman to lead the rolling-stone life that I lead—she wouldn't, anyhow."
Molly's eyes were fastened on the bow of the ship's boat; her heart pounded against the rail; she had never felt so frightened in her life.
And suddenly she became aware that she was staring at the letters E-L-L-A, and they looked very tiny, like the letters of the Lord's Prayer written in carved ivory toys, and something she had not thought of since she first left New York flashed into her mind, and she trembled slightly. Then all the vexed and broken, many-coloured fragments of her life clicked and settled into place, quietly and inevitably, as they do in a child's kaleidoscope, and the final pattern stood out, finished. She smiled slightly and thinks that perhaps she prayed. Then,
"Why don't you give the woman a chance?" said Molly Dickett.