"You know the situation I mean," he said. "I love you. I love you so much, Marian, that I am jealous of any work that would take you from me; I want so much of your love that I can spare none of it—none even for the poor and suffering."
In that tight grasp her hand fluttered a little, but she did not answer: she could not answer, because, while her brain was telling her that a love so rapacious was necessarily niggardly, her heart was crying out that this was the love it wanted most of all.
"Marian"—his voice shook now with the emotion that was tugging at its leash—"you've known for some months that I loved you; all last winter you must have seen this coming; you can't be unprepared to answer me!"
He possessed himself of her other hand, and pressed her inert palms between his own.
But the girl's determination loomed large to her. Through her entire life she had been shut away from the real world, behind rich curtains and amid soft lights, until, fired with the unrest of a partial education, she had chanced upon a glimpse of classmates working in what they called the slums, and now, with all the enthusiasm of youth, she had resolved to join them. A maturer woman would not have taken so seriously a sudden impulse to engage in work for which she had no training, but Marian was young.
"I am not unprepared," she answered. "I did know. But I know too that there are things that can make even love a finer, a better emotion."
The words reminded her of some speech she had once heard in a play, and, entirely in earnest as she was, the sound of them from her own lips strengthened her. She was in love with Wesley Dyker, but she was more in love with renunciation.
The man, however, shook his head.
"No," he said, "love is something ultimate. You can't paint the lily; you can't part it and share it; you must either cherish it or kill it. Which do you mean to do?"
The car had turned into the smoother way of Riverside Drive, where the lights are far fewer and less bright than Broadway's. He could not see her face, but he could not doubt the resolve that was in her voice as she answered: