The impulse to seize her hand was resistless. She made no effort to withdraw it and he pressed it tenderly.
A wistful smile played about the sensitive mouth and she was slow to answer.
“Tell me—have I a chance?” he pleaded.
Her voice was far away but clear-toned music. He heard his doom in its perfect rhythm before the words were complete.
“I can’t see,” she began slowly, “how two people could enter the sweet intimacy of marriage with a vital difference of opinion dividing them. I couldn’t. Your honesty and intellectual strength I admire. This honesty and strength will keep us opponents. Such an union is unthinkable—”
“Not if we love one another,” he protested eagerly. “There is but one issue in human life between man and woman and that is love. If you love me, nothing else matters—”
She shook her head.
“It isn’t true. You love me—but other things matter. Otherwise you would give them up to win your love. I claim to be your equal in brain and heart if not in muscle. You say that if I love nothing else matters and yet you say in the same breath that you risk your love to save your principles. In your heart you know that other things do matter, and with me they matter deeply. I believe with every beat of my heart that the progress of the world waits on the advent of women in the organization of its industries, its politics and its thinking. This consciousness of her mission in the modern woman is the biggest fact of our century—”
She paused and faced him with a look of iron purpose.
“No matter if I did love you—I’d tear that love out of my heart if it held me back from the fulfilment of the highest ideal of duty to my sex—”