“Let me tell you how I know,” she said, with more kindness.  “If I loved you, I could not stand here and speak of it to you in this way.  I could not tell you you are not a man.  Everything in me would go down before you.  You could do with my life what you pleased.  No one in comparison with you would mean anything to me—­not even mamma.  As long as I was with you, I should never wish to sleep; if you were away from me, I should never wish to waken.  If you were poor, if you were in trouble, you would be all the dearer to me—­if you only loved me, only loved me!”

Who is it that can mark down the moment when we ceased to be children?  Gazing backward in after years, we sometimes attempt dimly to fix the time.  “It probably occurred on that day,” we declare; “it may have taken place during that night.  It coincided with that hardship, or with that mastery of life.”  But a child can suffer and can triumph as a man or a woman, yet remain a child.  Like man and woman it can hate, envy, malign, cheat, lie, tyrannize; or bless, cheer, defend, drop its pitying tears, pour out its heroic spirit.  Love alone among the passions parts the two eternities of a lifetime.  The instant it is born, the child which was its parent is dead.

As Marguerite suddenly ceased speaking, frightened by the secret import of her own words, her skin, which had the satinlike fineness and sheen of white poppy leaves, became dyed from brow to breast with a surging flame of rose.  She turned partly away from Barbee, and she waited for him to go.

He looked at her a moment with torment in his eyes; then, lifting his hat without a word, he turned and walked proudly down the street toward his office.

Marguerite did not send a glance after him.  What can make us so cruel to those who vainly love us as our vain love of some one else?  What do we care for their suffering?  We see it in their faces, hear it in their speech, feel it as the tragedy of their lives.  But we turn away from them unmoved and cry out at the heartlessness of those whom our own faces and words and sorrow do not touch.

She lowered her parasol, and pressing her palm against one cheek and then the other, to force back the betraying blood, hurried agitated and elated into the library.  A new kind of excitement filled her:  she had confessed her secret, had proved her fidelity to him she loved by turning off the playmate of childhood.  Who does not know the relief of confessing to some one who does not understand?

The interior of the library was an immense rectangular room.  Book shelves projected from each side toward the middle, forming alcoves.  Seated in one of these alcoves, you could be seen only by persons who should chance to pass.  The library was never crowded and it was nearly empty now.  Marguerite lingered to speak with the librarian, meantime looking carefully around the room; and then moved on toward the shelves where she remembered having once seen a certain book of which she was now thinking.  It had not interested her then; she had heard it spoken of since, but it had not interested her since.  Only to-day something new within herself drew her toward it.