The first words of hers which we shall record are a strange utterance to come from a woman: 

“Let me tell you something which I have read lately.  It sounds like a satire, and yet there is too much truth in it:  ’Every woman in these days needs two husbands—­one to fill her purse, and one to fill her heart; one to dress her, and one to love her.  It is not easy to be the two in one.’  That is what I have read, and it is only too true.  Remember it, and don’t marry.”

A spasm of intense spiritual pain crossed the young man’s fine and kindly face.

“Don’t say such things, I beg of you!” he implored.  “I am sure that in what you have quoted there is a slander upon most women.  I know that it slanders you.”

Her lips parted as if for a contradiction, but it was evidently very pleasant to her to hear such words from him, and with a little childlike smile of gratification she let him proceed.

“I have perfect confidence in you,” he murmured.  “I am willing to put all my chances of happiness in your hands.  My only fear is that I am not half worthy of you—­not a thousandth part worthy of you.  Will you not listen to me seriously?  Will you not be so kind?”

A tremor of emotion slightly lifted her hands, and it seemed for a moment as if she would extend them to him.  Then there was a sudden revulsion:  with a more violent shudder, evidently of a painful nature, she threw herself backward, her face turned pale, and she closed her eyes as if to shut him from her sight.

“I ought to ask your pardon,” she whispered.  “I never thought that it would come to this.  I never meant that it should.  Oh, I ask your pardon.”  Recovering herself with singular quickness, a bright smile dancing along the constantly changing curves of her lips, like sunbeams leaping from wavelet to wavelet, she once more leaned cordially toward him, and said in a gay yet pleading tone, “Let us talk of something else.  Come, tell me about yourself—­all about yourself, nothing about me.”

“I cannot speak of anything else,” he replied, after looking at her long in silence.  “My whole being is full of you:  I cannot think of anything else.”

A smile of gratitude sweetly mastered her mouth:  then it suddenly turned to a smile of pity; then it died in a quiver of remorse.

“Oh, we cannot marry,” she sighed.  “We must not marry, if we could.  Let me tell you something dreadful.  People hate each other after they are married.  I know:  I have seen it.  I knew a girl of seventeen who married a man ten years older—­a man who was Reason itself.  Her friends told her, and she herself believed it, that she was sure of happiness.  But after three years she found that she did not love, that she was not loved, and that she was miserable.  He was too rational:  he used to judge her as he would a column of figures—­he had no comprehension for her feelings.”

There was a momentary pause, during which she folded her hands and looked at him, but with an air of not seeing him.  In the recollection of this heart-tragedy of the past and of another she had apparently forgotten the one which was now pressing upon herself.