old you. Yesterday I
was bursting with happiness, like a bird in the spring. I like you, big
man with the freckled face. You came down here and stood beside me and
smiled at me. And--and that's all--a minute's madness. We can't marry on
_that_. I can't. I _won't_."

His fingers tightened on the rounded arms. He shook her again with a
restrained savagery. If he hurt her she did not flinch, nor did her gray
eyes, cloudy now and wistful, waver before the passionate fire in his.

"Sophie," he went on, "you don't know what this means to me. Don't you
care a little?"

"Yes," she answered slowly. "Perhaps more than a little. I'm made that
way, I suppose. It isn't hard for me to love. But one doesn't--"

"Then why," he demanded, "why refuse to give me a hope? Why, if you care
in the least, is there no chance for me? It isn't just a sudden fancy.
I've been feeling it grow and struggling to repress it, ever since I
first saw you. You say you care--yet you won't even think of marrying
me. I can't understand that at all. Why?"

"Do you want to know? Can't you see good grounds why we two, of all
people, should _not_ marry?" she asked evenly. "Can you see anything to
make it desirable except a--a welling up of natural passion? Don't hold
my arms so tight. You hurt."

He released his unthinking grip and stepped back a pace, his expression
one of hurt bewilderment at the paradox of Sophie's admission and
refusal.

"We're at opposite poles in everything," she went on. "I don't believe
in the things you believe in. I don't see life with your vision at all.
I never shall. We'd be in a continual clash. I like you but I couldn't
possibly live with you--you couldn't live with me. I rebel at the future
I can see for us. Apart from yourself, the things you'd want to share
with me I despise. If I had to live in an atmosphere of sermons and
shams, of ministerial sanctimoniousness and material striving for a
bigger church and a bigger salary, I'd suffocate--I'd hate myself--and
in the end I'd hate you too."

A little note of scorn crept into her voice, and she stopped. When she
spoke again her tone had changed, deepened into uncertainty, freighted
with wistfulness.

"I'm not good--not in your sense of the word," she said. "I don't even
want to be. It would take all the joy out of living. I want to sing and
dance and be vibrantly alive. I want to see far countries and big
cities, to go about among people whose outlook isn't bounded by a