“There is one fact sitting up like a lighthouse on a rock.  I’m twenty-four years older than you.  Every five years that we live together from now on will make that difference more important.  When you’re forty-five—­and you’ll be just at the top of your powers by then—­I shall be one year short of seventy.  At the end, you see, even of my professional career.  And that’s only fifteen years away.  Even with good average luck, that’s all I can count on.  It’s strange how one can live along, oblivious to a simple sum in arithmetic like that.”

She had been on her feet moving distractedly about the room.  Now she came around behind his chair and gripped his body in her strong arms.

“You shan’t talk like that!” she said.  “You shan’t think like that!  I won’t endure it.  It’s morbid.  It’s horrible.”

“Oh, no, it’s not,” he said easily.  “The morbidity is in being afraid to look at it.  It was morbid to struggle frantically, the way I did all the spring, trying to resist the irresistible thing that was drawing you along your true path.  It was a cancerous egotism of mine that was trying to eat you up, live you up into myself.  That, thank God, has been cut out of me!  I think it has.  Don’t misunderstand me, though.  I’m not going to relinquish anything of you that I can keep;—­that I ever had a chance to keep.”

He took her hands and gently—­coolly—­kissed them.

“Then don’t relinquish anything,” she said.  “It’s all yours.  Can’t you believe that, John?”

He released her hands and sank back slackly in his chair.  “Victory!” he said, a note of inextinguishable irony in his voice.  “A victory I’d have given five years of my life for last March.  Yet I could go on winning them—­a whole succession of them—­and they could lead me to nothing but disaster.”

She left him abruptly and the next moment he heard her fling herself down upon his bed.  When he rose and disengaged himself from his rug, she said, over an irrepressible sob or two, that he wasn’t to mind nor come to her.  She wasn’t going to cry-not more than a minute.

He came, nevertheless, settled himself on the edge of the bed and took possession of her hands again.

“I wouldn’t have told you all this,” he said—­“for you don’t need any lessons in arithmetic, child—­if I dared trust myself to remember, after the other thing had come back.  Now I’m committed—­don’t you see?—­not to play the fool, tragically or ludicrously, as the case might be, trying to dispute the inevitable.  And I shall contrive to keep a lot, my dear.  More than you think.”

Later, the evening of that same day, he asked her what was in the letter that had provoked their talk.  Did they want her back in Chicago for rehearsals or consultations?  Because if they did there was no reason in the world why she should not go.  At the rate at which he was gaining strength there would not be the slightest reason—­he gave her his professional word of honor—­why she should not go back in a day or two.