nds miserably.

"I don't mean to be brutal," he said peaceably. "I'm sorry if I am."

"Oh, it's no matter!" she said impatiently.

"All right, have it your own way," he agreed, good-naturedly, shifting
into a more comfortable position, and resuming his patient silence. He
might have been a slightly pre-occupied but indulgent parent, waiting
for a naughty child to emerge from a tantrum.

After a while, "Well, then," she began as though nothing had passed
between them since his offer to give her advice, "well then, if you
want to be father-confessor, tell me what you'd do in my place, if your
family expected you as a matter of course to--to----"

"What do they want you to do?" he asked as she hesitated.

"Oh, nothing that they consider at all formidable! Only what every girl
should do--make a good and suitable marriage, and bring up children to
go on doing what she had found no joy in."

"Don't you do it!" he said quietly. "Nobody believes more than I do in
marrying the right person. But just marrying so's to _be_ married--that's
Tophet! Red-hot Tophet!"[133-1]

"But what else is there for me to do?" she said, turning her eyes to
him with a desperate hope in his answer. "Tell me! My parents have
brought me up so that there is nothing I can fill my life with, if--I
think, on the whole, I will be more miserable if I don't than if I----"

"Why, look-y-here!" he said earnestly. "You're not a child, you're a
grown woman. You have your music. You could earn your living by that.
Great Scott! Earn your living scrubbing floors before you----"

She put her handkerchief to her eyes. "Ah, but I am so alone against
all my world! Now, here, with you, it seems easy but--without any one
to sustain me, to----"

Harrison went on: "Now let me give you a rule I believe in as I do in
the sun's rising. Never marry a man just because you think you could
manage to live with him. Don't do it unless you are dead sure you
couldn't live without him!"

She took down her handkerchief, showing a white face, whose expression
matched the quaver in her voice, as she said breathlessly: "But how if
I meet a man and feel I cannot live without him, and he is already--"
she brought it out squarely in the sunny peace,--"if he is already as
good as married!"

He took it with the most single-hearted simplicity. "Now it's you who
are unsophisticated and getting your ideas from fool novels. Things
don't happen that way in real life. Either the man ke