"Look here! Would you give up your career for me?"
"A woman can't ask a man to give up his career," he answered; and she retorted with the spirit of her time:
"Then why should she give up hers for him?"
He looked an old-fashioned surprise. "And have you a career?"
"Of course I have. Every woman has; and nowadays a woman has got to look out for herself and her future, or she'll get left at the post."
"And what career have you?" he asked, amazed.
"Marriage. It's the average woman's main business in life, Harvey. If she fails in that she fails in everything."
"Then you think the poor have no right to marry?"
"Oh no, I'm not such a fool as that. There are people with simple tastes who can be happy on nothing a year—sweet domestic women who love to manage and cook and sweep and mend and sew. There are lots of unhappy rich women who would be thoroughly contented if they were the wives of laboring-men. But that doesn't happen to be my type. I can't help it. I grow positively sick at the sight of a needle. Even fancy stitching hurts my eyes. And I can't help that. There are lots of poor women who are making their homes hells because they have no money. They'd be angels if they didn't have to economize. Some people, rich and poor, take a sensuous delight in watching a bank account grow, and they get more thrill out of saving a penny than out of getting something more beautiful for it.
"But I'm not one of those. I'm a squanderer by nature. I hate to be denied things. I loathe counting the cost of things. I can't endure to see some one else wearing better things than I've got on. I want to throttle a woman who has a later hat than mine. Oh, I may be a bad one, Harvey, but it isn't my fault. I am what I was born to be. I've got to marry money, Harvey. I've just got to."