but you are not kind
and genial to all the world as you were then. You have become harsh
and cruel. And I know. Remember, I have studied you six days a week,
month after month, year after year; and I know more about the most
insignificant parts of you than you know of all of me. The cruelty is
not only in your heart and thoughts, but it is there in face. It has
put its lines there. I have watched them come and grow. Your money,
and the life it compels you to lead have done all this. You are being
brutalized and degraded. And this process can only go on and on until
you are hopelessly destroyed--"

He attempted to interrupt, but she stopped him, herself breathless and
her voice trembling.

"No, no; let me finish utterly. I have done nothing but think, think,
think, all these months, ever since you came riding with me, and now
that I have begun to speak I am going to speak all that I have in me.
I do love you, but I cannot marry you and destroy love. You are
growing into a thing that I must in the end despise. You can't help
it. More than you can possibly love me, do you love this business
game. This business--and it's all perfectly useless, so far as you are
concerned--claims all of you. I sometimes think it would be easier to
share you equitably with another woman than to share you with this
business. I might have half of you, at any rate. But this business
would claim, not half of you, but nine-tenths of you, or ninety-nine
hundredths.

"Remember, the meaning of marriage to me is not to get a man's money to
spend. I want the man. You say you want ME. And suppose I consented,
but gave you only one-hundredth part of me. Suppose there was something
else in my life that took the other ninety-nine parts, and,
furthermore, that ruined my figure, that put pouches under my eyes and
crows-feet in the corners, that made me unbeautiful to look upon and
that made my spirit unbeautiful. Would you be satisfied with that
one-hundredth part of me? Yet that is all you are offering me of
yourself. Do you wonder that I won't marry you?--that I can't?"

Daylight waited to see if she were quite done, and she went on again.

"It isn't that I am selfish. After all, love is giving, not receiving.
But I see so clearly that all my giving could not do you any good. You
are like a sick man. You don't play business like other men. You play
it heart and and all of you. No matter what you believed and intended
a wif