t even if I might learn, Dr. Marmion, be
sure that neither your college nor Heaven gave you the knowledge to
instruct me.... There: pardon me, if I speak harshly; but this is most
inconsiderate of you, most impulsive--and compromising. You are capable
of singular contrasts. Please let us be friends, friends simply. You are
too interesting for a lover, really you are."

Her words were a cold shock to my emotion--my superficial emotion;
though, indeed, for that moment she seemed adorable to me. Without any
apparent relevancy, but certainly because my thoughts in self-reproach
were hovering about cabin 116 Intermediate, I said, with a biting shame,
"I do not wonder now!"

"You do not wonder at what?" she questioned; and she laid her hand
kindly on my arm.

I put the hand away a little childishly, and replied, "At men going to
the devil." But this was not what I thought.

"That does not sound complimentary to somebody. May I ask you what you
mean?" she said calmly. "I mean that Anson loved his wife, and she did
not love him; yet she held him like a slave, torturing him at the same
time."

"Does it not strike you that this is irrelevant? You are not my
husband--not my slave. But, to be less personal, Mr. Anson's wife was
not responsible for his loving her. Love, as I take it, is a voluntary
thing. It pleased him to love her--he would not have done it if it
did not please him; probably his love was an inconvenient thing
domestically--if he had no tact."

"Of that," I said, "neither you nor I can know with any certainty. But,
to be scriptural, she reaped where she had not sowed, and gathered where
she had not strawed. If she did not make the man love her,--I believe
she did, as I believe you would, perhaps unconsciously, do,--she used
his love, and was therefore better able to make all other men admire
her. She was richer in personal power for that experience; but she was
not grateful for it nor for his devotion."

"You mean, in fact, that I--for you make the personal application--shall
be better able henceforth to win men's love, because--ah, surely, Dr.
Marmion, you do not dignify this impulse, this foolishness of yours, by
the name of love!" She smiled a little satirically at the fingers I had
kissed.

I was humiliated, and annoyed with her and with myself, though, down
in my mind, I knew that she was right. "I mean," said I, "that I can
understand how men have committed suicide because of just such things.
My wo