"As a duty—at the bitterest possible cost! How different that is! You not only plan to leave me—I feel that you want to!"
"Yes, I want to. But only if you can understand why."
"I don't understand!"
"Ah, wait, Ambo! You're not speaking for yourself. You're a slave now, speaking for your master. But it's you I want to talk to!"
I snarled at this. "Why? When you've discovered your mistake so soon! . . . You don't love me."
She sighed, deeply unhappy; though my thin-skinned self-esteem wrung from her sigh a shade of impatience, too.
"If not, dear," she said, "we had better find it out before it's too late. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps love is something I only guess at and go wrong about. If love means that I should be utterly lost in you and nothing without you—if it means that I would rather die than leave you—well, then I don't love you. But all the same, if love honestly means that to you—I can't and won't go away." She put out her hand again swiftly, and tightened her fingers on mine.
"It's a test, then. Is that it?" I demanded. "You want to go because you're not sure?"
"I'm sure of what I feel," she broke in; "and more than that, I doubt if I'm made so that I can ever feel more. No; that isn't why I want to go. I'll go if you can let me, because—oh, I've got to say it, Ambo!—because at heart I love freedom better than I love love—or you. And there's something else. I'm afraid of—please try to understand this, dear—I'm afraid of stuffiness for us both!"
"Stuffiness?"