The fact is worth recalling, perhaps, that away back in her childhood Wallace had sometimes reduced her to much this sort of frantic exasperation by his impregnable assumption that she was the white-souled little angel she looked.  Sitting here in this very room he had goaded her into committing freakish misdemeanors.

She was resisting now an impulse of much the same sort, though the parallel did not, of course, occur to her.  It was just a sort of inexplicable panic which she was reining in with all her might by telling herself how fond she really was of Graham and how terrible a thing it would be if she hurt him unnecessarily.  She dared not attempt to speak so she merely waited.  She was sitting relaxed, her head lowered, her chin supported by one hand.  This stillness and relaxation she always resorted to in making any supreme demand upon her self-control.

He looked at her rather helplessly once or twice during the silence.  Then arose and moved about restlessly.

“I know you don’t love me.  I’ve gone on hoping you could after I suppose I might have seen it wasn’t possible.  You’ve tried to and you can’t.  I don’t know if one as white as you could love any man—­that way.  Well, I’m not going to ask any more for that.  I want to ask, instead, that we be friends.  I haven’t spoiled the possibility of that, have I?”

She was taken utterly by surprise.  It didn’t seem possible that she had even heard aright and the face he turned to, as he asked that last question, was of one pitiably bewildered, yet lighted too by a gleam of gratitude.

“You really mean that, Graham?” she asked in a very ragged voice.  “Is that what you came to-day to tell me?”

“I mean it altogether,” he said earnestly.  “I mean it without any—­reservations at all.  You must believe that because it’s the—­basis for everything else.”

She repeated “everything else?” in clear interrogation; then dropped back rather suddenly into her former attitude.  Everything else!  What else was there to friendship but itself?

He turned back to the window.  “I’ve come to ask you to, marry me, Mary, just the same.  I couldn’t be any good as a friend, couldn’t take care of you and try to make you happy, unless in the eyes of the world I was your husband.  But I wouldn’t ask,—­I promise you I wouldn’t ask anything,—­anything at all.  You do understand, don’t you?  You’d be just as—­sacred to me ...”

Then he cried out in consternation at the sight of her, “Mary!  What is it?”

The tension had become too great, that was all.  Her self-control, slackened by the momentarily held belief that it was not needed, had snapped.

“I understand well enough,” she said.  “You would say good night at my bedroom door and good morning at the breakfast table.  I’ve read of arrangements like that in rather nasty-minded novels, but I didn’t suppose they existed anywhere else.  I can’t think of an existence more degradingly sensual than that;—­to go on for days and months and years being ‘sacred’ to a man; never satisfying the desires your nearness tortured him with—­to say nothing of what you did with your own!