querie:

"Certainly not."

"And why not?"

"I'll marry no man who is so careless whom he marries as you are."

CHAPTER IX

The whimsical solemnity of this made him roar. But a man does not love
a woman the less for being feminine, and when she thwarts him by a
womanliness she delights him excruciatingly.

But Mamise was in earnest. She believed in one emotion at a time. It
offended her to have Davidge suggest that the funeral baked meats of
her tragedy should coldly furnish forth a wedding breakfast. She
wanted to revel awhile in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her
sorrow, full penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous
impatience and returned to her theme.

"Well, after all the evil I have done, I wanted to make some
atonement. I was involved in the sinking of I don't know how many
ships, and I wanted to take some part in building others. So when I
met you and you told me that women could build ships, too, you wakened
a great hope in me, and an ambition. I wanted to get out in the yards
and swing a sledge or drive a riveting-gun."

"With those hands?" He laughed and reached for them.

She put them out of sight back of her as one removes dangerous toys
from the clutch of a child, and went on:

"But you wouldn't let me. So I took up the next best thing, office
work. I studied that hateful stenography and learned to play a
typewriter."

"It keeps you nearer to me."

"But I don't want to be near you. I want to build ships. Please let me
go out in the yard. Please give me a real job."

He could not keep from laughing at her, at such delicacy pleading for
such toil. His amusement humiliated her and baffled her so that at
length she said:

"Please go on home. It's getting late, and I don't like you at all."

"I know you don't like me, but couldn't you love me?"

"That's more impossible than liking you, since you won't let me have
my only wish."

"It's too brutal, I tell you. And it's getting too cold. It would
simply ruin your perfect skin. I don't want to marry a longshoreman,
thank you."

"Then I'll thank you to go on home. I'm tired out. I've got to get up
in the morning at the screech of dawn and take up your ghastly
drudgery again."

"If you'll marry me you won't have to work at all."

"But work is the one thing I want. So if you'll kindly take yourself
off I'll be much obliged. You've no business here, anyway, and it's
getting so late that you'll have all the neighbors t