“Not whether he’d written.  But he told us the rest.  How you wanted to go to work.  As a nursery governess.”

He paused there but she did not break in upon it.  She had given him all the lead he needed.  With the deliberate care that a suddenly tremulous hand made necessary he put down his teacup and spoke as if addressing it.

“I think you’re the bravest—­most wonderful person in the world.  Of course, I’ve known that always.  Not just since I came back last spring.  But this, that Mr. Hood told us this afternoon, somehow—­caps the climax.  I can’t tell you how it—­got me, to think of your being ready to do—­a thing like that.”

The last thing she would have done voluntarily was to put any obstacles in his way.  Her program, on the contrary was to help him along all she could to his declaration, make a refusal that should be as gentle as was consistent with complete finality, and then get rid of him before anything regrettably—­messy ensued.  But to have her courage rhapsodized over like this was a thing she could not endure.

“It’s nothing,” she said rather dryly, “beyond what most girls do nowadays as a matter of course.  I’m being rather cowardly about it, I think—­on account of some silly ideas I’ve been more or less brought up with perhaps, but...”

“What if they do?” he broke in; “thousands of them at the stores and in the offices.  It’s bad enough for them—­for any sort of woman.  But it’s different with you.  It’s horrible.  You aren’t like them.”

She tried to check herself but couldn’t.  “What’s the difference?  I’m healthy and half-educated and fairly young.  I have the same sort, pretty much, of thoughts and feelings.  I don’t believe I like being clean and warm and well-fed and amused and admired any better than the average girl does.  I ought to have found a job months ago, instead of letting Rush bring me home from New York.  Or else gone to work when I came home.  But every one was so horrified...”

“They were right to be,” he interrupted.  “It is a horrible idea.  Because you aren’t like the others.  You haven’t the same sort of thoughts and feelings.  A person doesn’t have to be in love with you to see that.  Your father and Rush and Mr. Hood all see it.  And as for me—­well, I couldn’t endure it, that’s all.  Oh, I know, you can act like anybody else; laugh and dance and talk nonsense and make a person forget sometimes.  But the other thing is there all the while—­shining through—­oh, it can’t be talked about!—­like a light.  Of—­of something a decent man wants to be guided by, whatever he does.  And for you to go out into the world with that, where there can’t be any protection at all ...  I can’t stand it, Mary.  That’s why I came to-day instead of Mr. Hood.”

She went very white during that speech and tears came up into her eyes.  Tears of helpless exasperation.  It was such a cruelly inhuman thing to impose an ideal like that upon a woman.  It was so smug, so utterly satisfactory to all romantic sentimentalists.  Wallace would approve every word of it.  Wallace had sent him to say just this;—­was waiting now to be told the good news of his success.