"You mean the 'honor and obey' kind? But don't want that when I marry. I want a man to say to me, 'Come, let us fight the battle together. If it's defeat, we'll go down together. If its victory, we'll win.'"
This was to him a strange language, yet there was that about it which thrilled him.
Yet he insisted, dogmatically, "There are men enough in the world to take care of the women, and the women should let them."
"No, they should not. Suppose I should not marry. Must I let Barry take care of me, or Constance—and go on as Aunt Isabelle has, eating the bread of dependence?"
"But you? Why, one only needs to look at you to know that there'll be a live-happy-ever-after ending to your romance."
"That's what they thought about Aunt Isabelle. But she lost her lover, and she couldn't love again. And if she had had an absorbing occupation, she would have been saved so much humiliation, so much heart-break."
She told him the story with its touching pathos. "And think of it," she ended, "right here in our garden by the fountain, she saw him for the last time."
Chilled by the ghostly breath of dead romance, they sat for a while in silence, then Mary said: "So that's why I'm trying to learn something—that will have an earning value. I can sing and play a little, but not enough to make—money."
She sighed, and he set himself to help her.
"The quickest way," he said, "to acquire speed, is to have some one read to you."