"Happiness?"
"Yes—yes! It will be that! I don't need anything except what I shall have. I don't want anything else. Can't you understand? Do you think women feel as—as men do? Do you think the kind of love that men experience is also experienced by women? I don't want it; I don't require it! I've—I've always had a contempt for it—and I have still.... Anyway I have offered you the best that is in me to offer any man—friendship. That is the nearest I can come to love. Why can't you take it—and let me alone! What is it to you if I marry and find security and comfort and quiet and protection, as long as I give you my friendship—as long as I never swerve in it—as long as I hold you first among my friends—first among men if you wish! More I cannot offer you—I will not! Now let me go!"
"Your other self, fighting me," he said, half to himself.
"No, I am! What do you mean by my other self! There is no other——"
"Its lips rested on mine for a moment!"
She blushed scarlet:
"Is that what you mean!—the stupid, unworthy, material self——"
"The trinity is incomplete without it."
She wrenched her hand free, and stood staring at him breathing unevenly as though frightened.
After a moment he began to pace the floor, hands dropped into his coat pockets, his teeth worrying his under lip: