ty if for no other
reason. She must. Don't you see? They're practically the only men she
really comes to know or who come to know her, and she just can't stab
her heart into sudden death.

"So she wears her prettiest frock for this man--a wooden-faced
bookkeeper perhaps; or a preoccupied president--and she dreams of him
and is jealous of him and very likely gossips about him. And the years
pass and she stays just as shut away and misunderstood and starved.
And sometimes a woman, originally the most honest in the world, under
these circumstances will deliberately steal another woman's husband if
she has the chance. Yes, she will--she does."

"What do you mean, Mary?" He was almost unconscious of using the
name.

"That I am no different from the others. I came here with the same
starved heart and woman's hopes, and I put into your career the
devotion and service and very prayers that I should have put into a
home and a family--your joys were my joys, your problems mine. It has
not been my clever brain that has made me worth so much to you. That
is what the superficial public says, but I know better. It's been the
love--yes, the love for you that has made me indispensable! The
unreturned and unsuspected and I presume wicked love I felt for you.
And now I've told you--broken precedent and told the truth. And as
you don't love me you'll feel very uncomfortable with me about. And
you won't want to play off pal; you'll fight shy of me except for
everyday work. So it has been the only square thing to do--humiliate
myself into telling.

"I love you, I always have, and I always will--but I'm no home-wrecking,
emotional being and I expect that you will resume our old relationships
and I shall go on serving you and knowing my recompense will be a
handsome farewell gift and a pension.

"Oh, the business woman's life isn't all beer and skittles. We're
expected to lie about our hearts, yet be as reliable as an adding
machine about our columns of figures; to be shut away from the social
world, thrown with men more hours a day than their wives see them and
yet remain immovable, aloof, disinterested! Just good fellows, you
know. Isn't it hideous to think I've really told the truth?"

At this identical moment their platonic friendship, alias tropical
twilight, ended, and Mary's evening star of romance rose to stay. But
such being the case Steve was the last person in the world to try to
convince her that it was so.

All he said