could move the nursery and give you Florence's old studio. And
then it would do if you only came down here for your two big
seasons--fall and spring."

"That doesn't seem fair to you," she protested. "You deserve a real
wife, Roddy; not somebody dashing in and dashing out."

"I don't deserve anything I can't get," he said. "I'd rather have a part
interest in you than to possess, lock, stock and barrel, any other woman
I can think of."

She came back to him again and settled down in his arms.

"You used to possess me, lock, stock and barrel," she said. "You can do
it again, if you'll say the word, Rodney."

He shook his head. "That's just what I can't do," he told her. "That's
gone and we'll never get it back. And I don't believe I'd have it back
if I could. For one thing, you can't possess without being possessed. I
know that back in those days you're talking about I used to try to fight
you out of my thoughts. Used to stay down late at the office, not
working, just--trying not to think about you. Trying to save out part of
myself from being--saturated with you. It was the fact that I was so
terribly important to you that used to make me feel like that; the fact
of your--dependence--I don't mean for money--on me. I used to think--it
wasn't your lover that thought that; it was the other man--that it
would be a perfectly wonderful relief to me if you could just get some
interest that left me out. And all the while the lover in me was trying
to have all of you there was. It's a hard thing to talk sense about."

"A man told me," Rose said, "--John Galbraith told me, that he couldn't
be a woman's friend and her lover at the same time, any more than a
steel spring could be made soft so that it would bend in your fingers
like copper, and still be a spring. He said that was true of him,
anyway, and he felt sure it was true of nine men out of a dozen. Do you
think it's true? Have we got to decide which we'll be?"

"We can't decide," he said with an impatient laugh. "That's just what
I've been telling you. We've got to take what we can get. We've got to
work out the relation between ourselves that is _our_ relation--the Rose
and Rodney relation. It'll probably be a little different from any
other. There'll be friendship in it, and there'll be love in it. Imagine
our 'deciding' that we wouldn't be lovers! But I guess that what
Galbraith said was true to this extent: that each of those will be more
or less at the expense of