“The terms, Kate?  Why, I’ll love you as long as I live; I’ll treasure you as the most precious thing in all the world.”

“And the winds of heaven shall not be allowed to visit my cheek too roughly,” she managed to say tantalizingly.

He paused, perplexed.

“I know I bewilder you, dear man,” she said.  “But this is the point:  I don’t want to be protected.  I mean I don’t want to be made dependent; I don’t want my interpretations of life at second-hand.  I object to having life filter through anybody else to me; I want it, you see, on my own account.”

“Why, Kate!” It wasn’t precisely a protest.  He seemed rather to reproach her for hindering the onward sweep of their happiness—­for opposing him with her ideas when they might together have attained a beautiful emotional climax.

“I couldn’t stand it,” she went on, lifting her eyes to his, “to be given permission to do this, that, or the other thing; or to be put on an allowance; or made to ask a favor—­”

He sank down in his chair and folded across his breast the arms whose embrace she had not claimed.

“You seem to mean,” he said, “that you don’t want to be a wife.  You prefer your independence to love.”

“I want both,” Kate declared, rising and standing before him.  “I want the most glorious and abounding love woman ever had.  I want so much of it that it never could be computed or measured—­so much it will lift me up above anything that I now am or that I know, and make me stronger and freer and braver.”

“Well, that’s what your love would do for me,” broke in McCrea.  “That’s what the love of a good woman is expected to do for a man.”

“Of course,” cried Kate; “but is that what the love of a good man is expected to do for a woman?  Or is it expected to reconcile her to obscurity, to the dimming of her personality, and to the endless petty sacrifices that ought to shame her—­and don’t—­those immoral sacrifices about which she has contrived to throw so many deceiving, iridescent mists of religion?  Oh, yes, we are hypnotized into our foolish state of dependence easily enough!  I know that.  The mating instinct drugs us.  I suppose the unborn generations reach out their shadowy multitudinous hands and drag us to our destiny!”

“What a woman you are!  How you put things!” He tried but failed to keep the offended look from his face, and Kate knew perfectly well how hard he was striving not to think her indelicate.  But she went on regardlessly.

“You think that’s the very thing I ought to want to be my destiny?  Well, perhaps I do.  I want children—­of course, I want them.”

She stopped for a moment because she saw him flushing with embarrassment.  Yet she couldn’t apologize, and, anyway, an apology would avail nothing.  If he thought her unwomanly because she talked about her woman’s life,—­the very life to which he was inviting her,—­nothing she could say would change his mind.  It wasn’t a case for argument.  She walked over to the fire and warmed her nervous hands at it.