He thought it over a bit longer and then went on. "No, I've been in love
with women I could suspect of anything. Women I thought were lying to
me, cheating me; women I've hated; women I've known hated me. But I've
never been in love with a woman who was my friend. I'd never figured it
out before, but it's so."

In the process of figuring it out he'd more or less forgotten Rose. He
had been tramping along communing with his pipe; thinking aloud. If he'd
been watching her face he wouldn't have gone so far.

"Well, if it's like that," she said, and the quality of her voice drew
his full attention instantly--"if love has to be like that, then the
game doesn't seem worth going on with. You can't live with it, and you
can't live--without it." Her voice dropped a little, but gained in
intensity. "At least I can't. I don't believe I can." She stopped and
faced him. "What can one _do_?" she demanded. "Wait, I suppose you'll
say, till you're fifty. Well, you're fifty, and the thing can still
torment you; spring on you when you aren't looking; twist you about."
She turned away with a despairing gesture and stood gazing out,
tear-blinded, over the little valley the hilltop they had reached
commanded.

"You want to remember this," he said at last. "I've been talking about
myself. I haven't even pretended to guess for more than nine of those
twelve men. That leaves three who are, I am pretty sure, different. I
might have been different myself, a little anyway, if I'd got a
different sort of start. If my first love-affair had been an altogether
different thing. If it had been the kind that gave me a home and kids.
So you don't want to take what I've said for anything more than just the
truth about me. And I'm not, thank God, a fair sample."

He stood behind her, miserably helpless to say or do anything to comfort
her. An instinct told him she didn't want his hands on her just then,
and he couldn't unsay the things he had told her any further than he had
already.

Presently she turned back to him, slid her hand inside his arm, and
started down the road with him. "My love-affair brought me a home
and--kids," she said. "There are two of them--twins--a year and a half
old now; and I went off and left them; left him. And all I did it for
was to make myself over, into somebody he could be friends with, instead
of just--as I said then--his mistress. I'd never known a woman then who
was a man's mistress, really, and I didn't see why