“I don’t need to,” she answered coolly.  “It wouldn’t work.  You don’t appear to have any idea what it means for a woman to give herself up body and soul to a man she doesn’t care for.  For me it would be plain selling myself.  I haven’t the least affection for you personally.  I might even detest you.”

“You wouldn’t,” he said positively.

“What makes you so sure of that?” she demanded.

“It would sound conceited if I told you why,” he drawled.  “Listen.  We’re not gods and goddesses, we human beings.  We’re not, after all, in our real impulses, so much different from the age when a man took his club and went after a female that looked good to him.  They mated, and raised their young, and very likely faced on an average fewer problems than arise in modern marriages supposedly ordained in Heaven.  You’d have the one big problem solved,—­the lack of means to live decently,—­which wrecks more homes than anything else, far more than lack of love.  Affection doesn’t seem to thrive on poverty.  What is love?”

His voice took on a challenging note.

Stella shook her head.  He puzzled her, wholly serious one minute, a whimsical smile twisting up the corners of his mouth the next.  And he surprised her too by his sureness of utterance on subjects she had not supposed would enter such a man’s mind.

“I don’t know,” she answered absently, turning over strips of bacon with the long-handled fork.

“There you are,” he said.  “I don’t know either.  We’d start even, then, for the sake of argument.  No, I guess we wouldn’t either, because you’re the only woman I’ve run across so far with whom I could calmly contemplate spending the rest of my life in close contact.  That’s a fact.  To me it’s a highly important fact.  You don’t happen to have any such feeling about me, eh?”

“No.  I hadn’t even thought of you in that way,” Stella answered truthfully.

“You want to think about me,” he said calmly.  “You want to think about me from every possible angle, because I’m going to come back and ask you this same question every once in a while, so long as you’re in reach and doing this dirty work for a thankless boss.  You want to think of me as a possible refuge from a lot of disagreeable things.  I’d like to have you to chum with, and I’d like to have some incentive to put a big white bungalow on that old foundation for us two,” he smiled.  “I’ll never do it for myself alone.  Go on.  Take a gambling chance and marry me, Stella.  Say yes, and say it now.”

But she shook her head resolutely, and as Katy John came in just then, Fyfe took his foot off the stove and went out of the kitchen.  He threw a glance over his shoulder at Stella, a broad smile, as if to say that he harbored no grudge, and nursed no wound in his vanity because she would have none of him.