She looked me full, unflinchingly in the eyes.
"If you would give me the privilege of bearing your name, I should be a proud and happy woman."
We remained there, I don't know how long—she with her hand on my shoulder, I caressing her dear hair. It was a tremendous temptation. To have my beloved Betty in all her exquisite warm loyalty bound to me for the rest of my crippled life. But I found the courage to say:
"My dear, you are young still, with the wonderful future that no one alive can foretell before you, and I am old—"
"You're not fifty."
"Still I am old, I belong to the past—to a sort of affray behind an ant-hill which they called a war. I'm dead, my dear, you are gloriously alive. I'm of the past, as I say. You're of the future. You, my dearest, are the embodiment of the woman of the Great War—" I smiled—"The Woman of the Great War in capital letters. What your destiny is, God knows. But it isn't to be tied to a Prehistoric Man like me."
She rose and stood, with her beautiful bare arms behind her, sweet, magnificent.
"I am a Woman of the Great War. You are quite right. But in a year or so I shall be like other women of the war who have suffered and spent their lives, a woman of the past—not of the future. All sorts of things have been burned up in it." In a quick gesture she stretched out her hands to me. "Oh, can't you understand?"
I cannot set down the rest of the tender argument. If she had loved me less, she could have lived in my house, like Phyllis, without a thought of the conventions. But loving me dearly, she had got it into her feminine head that the sacredness of the marriage tie would crown with dignity and beauty the part she had resolved to play for my happiness.
Well, if I have yielded I pray it may not be set down to me for selfish exploitation of a woman's exhausted hour. When I said something of the sort, she laughed and cried: