n life till he made up his
mind to leave it; and now merely the starting-place of several lines of
steamers. Oh, I didn't have to love you to know that! I only had to live
with _him_.... If he lost his eye-glasses he'd think it was the fault of
the eye-glasses; he'd really feel that the eyeglasses had been careless.
And he'd be convinced that no others would suit him quite as well.
But at the optician's he'd probably be told that he needed something a
little different, and after that he'd feel that the old eye-glasses had
never suited him at all, and that _that_ was their fault too....'

"At one moment--but I don't recall when--I remember she stood up with
one of her quick movements, and came toward me, holding out her arms.
'Oh, my dear, I'm pleading for my life; do you suppose I shall ever want
for arguments?' she cried....

"After that, for a bit, nothing much remains with me except a sense of
darkness and of conflict. The one spot of daylight in my whirling brain
was the conviction that I couldn't--whatever happened--profit by the
sudden impulse she had acted on, and allow her to take, in a moment of
passion, a decision that was to shape her whole life. I couldn't so
much as lift my little finger to keep her with me then, unless I were
prepared to accept for her as well as for myself the full consequences
of the future she had planned for us....

"Well--there's the point: I wasn't. I felt in her--poor fatuous idiot
that I was!--that lack of objective imagination which had always seemed
to me to account, at least in part, for many of the so-called heroic
qualities in women. When their feelings are involved they simply can't
look ahead. Her unfaltering logic notwithstanding, I felt this about
Paulina as I listened. She had a specious air of knowing where she was
going, but she didn't. She seemed the genius of logic and understanding,
but the demon of illusion spoke through her lips....

"I said just now that I hadn't, at the outset, given my own side of the
case a thought. It would have been truer to say that I hadn't given it a
_separate_ thought. But I couldn't think of her without seeing myself as
a factor--the chief factor--in her problem, and without recognizing that
whatever the experiment made of me, that it must fatally, in the end,
make of her. If I couldn't carry the thing through she must break
down with me: we should have to throw our separate selves into
the melting-pot of this mad adventure, and be 'o