She answered it that night.
"I am going to be very frank with you, Bruce, because in being frank with you I shall be frank with myself. If Ulrich Stölle had not come into my life, I should probably have thought I cared for you. Even now when I am saying 'no,' I realize that your charm has always held me, and that the prospect of a future by your pleasant fireside holds many attractions. But since you left Washington, something has happened which I never expected, and all of my preconceived ideas of myself have been overturned. Bruce, I am no longer the Emily you have known—a little staid, gray-haired, with pretty hands, but with nothing else very pretty about her; a lady who would, perhaps, fill gracefully, a position for which her aristocratic nose fits her. I am no longer the Emily of the Toy Shop, wearing spectacles on a black ribbon, eating her lunches wherever she can get them. No, I am an Emily who is young and beautiful, a sort of fairy-tale Princess, an Emily who, if she wishes, shall sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, but who doesn't wish it because she hates to sew, and would much rather work in her silver-bell-and-cockle shell garden—oh, such a wonderful garden as it is!
"And I am all this, Bruce, I am young and beautiful and all the rest, because I am seeing myself through the eyes of my lover.
"He is Ulrich Stölle, as I have said, and you mustn't think because his name is German that he is to be cast into outer darkness. He is as American as you with your Scotch blood, or as I with my English blood. And he is as loyal as any of us. He is too old to be accepted for service, but he is giving time and money to the cause.
"And he loves me rapturously, radiantly, romantically. He doesn't want me as a cushion for his tired head, he doesn't want me because he thinks it would be an act of altruism to provide a haven for me in my old age, he wants me because he thinks I am the most remarkable woman in the whole wide world, and that he is the most fortunate man to have won me.
"And you don't feel that way about it, Bruce. You know that I am not beautiful, there is no glamour in your love for me. You know that I am not wonderful, or a fairy Princess—. And you are right and he is wrong. But it is his wrongness which makes me love him. Because every woman wants to be beautiful to her lover, and to feel that she is much desired.
"You will ask why I am telling you all this. Well, there was one sentence in your letter which called it forth. You say that you want me because I will hold you to the best that is in you.
"Oh, Bruce, what would you gain if I held you? Wouldn't there be moments when in spite of me you would swing back to women like Hilda? You are big and fine, but you are spoiled by feminine worship—it is a temptation which assails clergymen and doctors—who have, as it were, many women at their feet.
"Does that sound harsh? I don't mean it that way. I only want you to come into your own. And if you ever marry I want you to find some woman you can love as you loved your wife, someone who will touch your imagination, set you on fire with dreams, and I could never do it.
"Yet even as I finish this letter, I am tempted to tear it up and tell you only of my real appreciation of the honor you have conferred upon me in asking me to be your wife. I know that you are offering me more in many ways than Ulrich Stölle. I don't like his name, because something rises up in me against Teuton blood and Teuton nomenclature. But he loves me, and you do not, and because of his love for me and mine for him, everything else seems too small to consider.