“Marriage! What other career is open to a woman? Unless she is married, and married well, according to the money standard you men have set up, she is nobody. We can't all be Florence Nightingales, and I am unable to imagine myself a Julia Ward Howe or a Harriet Beecher Stowe. What is left? Nothing but marriage. I'm hard and cynical, you will say, but I have thought, and I'm not afraid, as I have told you, to look things in the face. There are very few women, I think, who would not take the real thing if they had the chance before it were too late, who wouldn't be willing to do their own cooking in order to get it.”
She fell silent suddenly. I began to pace the room.
“For God's sake, don't do this, Nancy!” I begged.
But she continued to stare into the fire, as though she had not heard me.
“If you had made up your mind to do it, why did you tell me?” I asked.
“Sentiment, I suppose. I am paying a tribute to what I once was, to what you once were,” she said. “A—a sort of good-bye to sentiment.”
“Nancy!” I said hoarsely.
She shook her head.
“No, Hugh. Surely you can't misjudge me so!” she answered reproachfully. “Do you think I should have sent for you if I had meant—that!”
“No, no, I didn't think so. But why not? You—you cared once, and you tell me plainly you don't love him. It was all a terrible mistake. We were meant for each other.”