he inevitable effect of concealing, denying, disowning, the central
fact, the motive power of one's existence? She asked me to picture the
course of such a love: first working as a fever in the blood, distorting
and deflecting everything, making all other interests insipid, all other
duties irksome, and then, as the acknowledged claims of life regained
their hold, gradually dying--the poor starved passion!--for want of the
wholesome necessary food of common living and doing, yet leaving life
impoverished by the loss of all it might have been.

"'I'm not talking, dear--' I see her now, leaning toward me with shining
eyes: 'I'm not talking of the people who haven't enough to fill their
days, and to whom a little mystery, a little manoeuvring, gives an
illusion of importance that they can't afford to miss; I'm talking of
you and me, with all our tastes and curiosities and activities; and I
ask you what our love would become if we had to keep it apart from our
lives, like a pretty useless animal that we went to peep at and feed
with sweetmeats through its cage?'

"I won't, my dear fellow, go into the other side of our strange duel:
the arguments I used were those that most men in my situation would
have felt bound to use, and that most women in Paulina's accept
instinctively, without even formulating them. The exceptionalness, the
significance, of the case lay wholly in the fact that she had formulated
them all and then rejected them....

"There was one point I didn't, of course, touch on; and that was the
popular conviction (which I confess I shared) that when a man and a
woman agree to defy the world together the man really sacrifices much
more than the woman. I was not even conscious of thinking of this at the
time, though it may have lurked somewhere in the shadow of my scruples
for her; but she dragged it out into the daylight and held me face to
face with it.

"'Remember, I'm not attempting to lay down any general rule,' she
insisted; 'I'm not theorizing about Man and Woman, I'm talking about you
and me. How do I know what's best for the woman in the next house? Very
likely she'll bolt when it would have been better for her to stay at
home. And it's the same with the man: he'll probably do the wrong thing.
It's generally the weak heads that commit follies, when it's the strong
ones that ought to: and my point is that you and I are both strong
enough to behave like fools if we want to....

"'Take your own case fir