t, Penelope?"

"I love you very dearly, but I've had enough of marriage. I've done my
duty. I don't see how I could keep on loving a man after I married him,
even if he weren't a cripple. The process of adjustment is simply
frightful. Marriage is just a contract binding one to do the
impossible!"

Jim scowled. More and more he was realizing how Sara had hurt Pen.

"You don't care a rap about me, Pen. Why don't you admit it?"

Pen gave a sudden tearful smile. "You know better, Jim. But just to
prove to you what a silly goose I am, I'll show you something. Girls in
real life do this even more than they do it in novels!"

Pen opened a flat locket she always wore. A folded bit of paper and a
tiny photograph fluttered into her lap. She gave both to Jim. The
picture was a snapshot of Jim in his football togs. The bit of paper,
unfolded, showed in Pen's handwriting a verse from Christina Rossetti:

"Too late for love, too late for joy;
Too late! Too late!
You loitered on the road too long,
You trifled at the gate:
The enchanted dove upon her branch
Died without a mate:
The enchanted princess in her tower
Slept, died, behind the grate:
Her heart was starving all this time
You made it wait."

Jim put the bit of paper into his pocket and gave Pen the picture. His
eyes were full of tears.

"Pen! Pen!" he cried. "Let me make it up to you! We care so much!
Suppose we aren't always happy. Oh, my love, a month of life with you
would make me willing to bear all the spiritual drudgery of marriage!"

White to the lips, Pen answered once more: "Jim, I will never leave
Sara. There is such a thing as honor. It's the last foundation that the
whole social fabric rests on. I promised to stay with Sara, in the
marriage service. He's kept his word. It's my business to keep mine,
until he breaks his."

Jim stood with set face. "Is this final, Penelope?"

"It's final, Still."

"Do you mind if I go on alone, Pen?"

Pen shook her head and Jim turned down the mountainside. And Pen, being
a woman, put her head down on her knees and cried her heart out. Then
she went back to Sara.

That night Jim answered the Secretary's letter:

"My work has always been technical. I know that the Projects are not the
success their sponsors in Congress hoped they would be, but I feel that
you ask too much of your engineers when you ask them not only to make
the dam but to administer it. I have about conclud