intentions.

"Dear Stephen," she explained, "if I were to come away with you and
marry you, in just a little time I should cease to be your lover, I
should be your squaw. I should have to share your worries and make your
coffee--and disappoint you, disappoint you and fail you in a hundred
ways. Think! Should I be any good as a squaw? How can one love when one
knows the coffee isn't what it should be, and one is giving one's lover
indigestion? And I don't _want_ to be your squaw. I don't want that at
all. It isn't how I feel for you. I don't _want_ to be your servant and
your possession."

"But you will be Justin's--squaw, you are going to marry him!"

"That is all different, Stevenage. Between him and me there will be
space, air, dignity, endless servants----"

"But," I choked. "You! He! He will make love to you, Mary."

"You don't understand, Stephen."

"He will make love to you, Mary. Mary! don't you understand? These
things---- We've never talked of them.... You will bear him children!"

"No," she said.

"But----"

"No. He promises. Stephen,--I am to own myself."

"But--He marries you!"

"Yes. Because he--he admires me. He cannot live without me. He loves my
company. He loves to be seen with me. He wants me with him to enjoy all
the things he has. Can't you understand, Stephen?"

"But do you mean----?"

Our eyes met.

"Stephen," she said, "I swear."

"But---- He hopes."

"I don't care. He has promised. I have his promise. I shall be free. Oh!
I shall be free--free! He is a different man from you, Stephen. He isn't
so fierce; he isn't so greedy."

"But it parts us!"

"Only from impossible things."

"It parts us."

"It does not even part us, Stevenage. We shall see one another! we shall
talk to one another."

"I shall lose you."

"I shall keep you."

"But I--do you expect me to be content with _this_?"

"I will make you content. Oh! Stephen dear, can't there be love--love
without this clutching, this gripping, this carrying off?"

"You will be carried altogether out of my world."

"If I thought that, Stephen, indeed I would not marry him."

But I insisted we should be parted, and parted in the end for ever, and
there I was the wiser of the two. I knew the insatiable urgency within
myself. I knew that if I continued to meet Mary I should continue to
desire her until I possessed her altogether.

Sec. 6

I cannot reproduce with any greater exactness than this the quality and
gist