"But have you met your ideal since?"
"Yes," said I, knowing full well whither the conversation was drifting.
"Then why don't you marry her?"
"I haven't asked her," I said.
"But why not, if she is your ideal?"
"Because," I replied, throwing caution to the winds—and, after all, what was convention to us in our circumstances?—"she is too rich!"
"You don't ask me," said the girl after a pause, "whether I have an ideal?"
"Naturally," I retorted, "since you evaded answering my question when I asked you if you had ever been in love...."
"The man I marry," she said in a low voice, "must make me feel such confidence in him that even in the hour of death I shall not be afraid...."
I dropped her hand and stood up. It's all very well to be philosophical about meeting death when you have no attachment on earth; but this slim, proud girl with the grey eyes and the clustering brown hair was stimulating in me the desire to live.