ft their mark on me
to this day. Yes, Ann: the old childish compact between us was an
unconscious love compact.

ANN. Jack!

TANNER. Oh, don't be alarmed--

ANN. I am not alarmed.

TANNER. [whimsically] Then you ought to be: where are your principles?

ANN. Jack: are you serious or are you not?

TANNER. Do you mean about the moral passion?

ANN. No, no; the other one. [Confused] Oh! you are so silly; one never
knows how to take you.

TANNER. You must take me quite seriously. I am your guardian; and it is
my duty to improve your mind.

ANN. The love compact is over, then, is it? I suppose you grew tired of
me?

TANNER. No; but the moral passion made our childish relations
impossible. A jealous sense of my new individuality arose in me.

ANN. You hated to be treated as a boy any longer. Poor Jack!

TANNER. Yes, because to be treated as a boy was to be taken on the old
footing. I had become a new person; and those who knew the old person
laughed at me. The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took
my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with
their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

ANN. You became frightfully self-conscious.

TANNER. When you go to heaven, Ann, you will be frightfully conscious of
your wings for the first year or so. When you meet your relatives there,
and they persist in treating you as if you were still a mortal, you will
not be able to bear them. You will try to get into a circle which has
never known you except as an angel.

ANN. So it was only your vanity that made you run away from us after
all?

TANNER. Yes, only my vanity, as you call it.

ANN. You need not have kept away from ME on that account.

TANNER. From you above all others. You fought harder than anybody
against my emancipation.

ANN. [earnestly] Oh, how wrong you are! I would have done anything for
you.

TANNER. Anything except let me get loose from you. Even then you had
acquired by instinct that damnable woman's trick of heaping obligations
on a man, of placing yourself so entirely and helplessly at his mercy
that at last he dare not take a step without running to you for leave.
I know a poor wretch whose one desire in life is to run away from his
wife. She prevents him by threatening to throw herself in front of the
engine of the train he leaves her in. That is what all women do. If we
try to go where you do not want us to go there is no law to prevent us,
but