our lives are so far, so very far, apart. I do not feel I could
be happy leading yours, and you do not understand mine."

"I have come to find out about yours," John explained. "That is why I am
here. Perhaps I ought to have waited a little time before I spoke to you
as I did just now. Come, you can forget what I have said and done; but
to me it will be an everlasting joy. I shall treasure the memory of it.
It will help me--I can't tell you quite in what way it will help me. But
for the rest, I will serve my apprenticeship. I will try to get into
sympathy with the things that please you. It will not take me long. As
soon as you feel that we are drawing closer together, I will ask you
again what I have asked you this afternoon. In the meantime, I may be
your friend, may I not? You will let me see a great deal of you? You
will help me just a little?"

Louise leaned back in her chair. She had been carried off her feet,
brought face to face with emotions which she dared not analyze. Perhaps,
after all her self-dissection, there were still secret chambers. She
thought almost with fear of what they might contain. Her sense of
superiority was vanishing. She was, after all, like other women.

"Yes," she promised, "I will help. We will leave it at that. Some day
you shall talk to me again, if you like. In the meantime, remember we
are both free. You have not known many women, and you may change your
mind when you have been longer in London. Perhaps it will be better for
you if you do!"

"That is quite impossible," John said firmly. "You see," he went on,
looking at her with shining eyes, "I know now what I half believed from
the first moment that I saw you. I love you!"

Springing restlessly to her feet, she walked across the room and back
again. Action of some sort seemed imperative. A curious hypnotic feeling
seemed to be dulling all her powers of resistance. She looked into her
life and she was terrified. Everything had grown insignificant. It
couldn't really be possible that with her brains, her experience, this
man who had dwelt all his life in the simple ways had yet the power to
show her the path toward the greater things!

Through the complex web of emotions which made up her temperament there
suddenly sprang a primitive instinct, the primitive instinct of all
women, rebelling against the first touch of a master's hand. Was she to
find herself wrong and this man right? Was she to submit, to accept from
his hand the