“I’ll tell you what there is to talk about,” said Christine.  “Something that has never been mentioned in all the discussions that have been taking place.  And that is my feelings.”

“Your feelings,” Riatt began, rather contemptuously, but she stopped him.

“No,” she said, “you shan’t say what you were going to.  My feelings, my feelings for you.  You’ve told me that you did not love me, that you despised me, that you did love me, but you’ve never asked how I felt to you.”

“But you’ve made it so clear.  You felt that, in default of anything else, I would do.”

She leaned across the table and looked at him gravely.  “Max,” she said, “I love you.”

He made no motion, not even one of contempt, and so she got up, and coming round the table, she knelt down beside him and put her arms tightly about him.  Still he did not move, except that his hands, which had been hanging at his sides, now gripped the edges of the chair with the rigidity of iron, and he said in a voice which sounded even in his own ears like that of a total stranger: 

“What folly this is, Christine!”

“Why is it folly?”

“If you had said this six weeks ago, while I still had enough money to—­”

“If I had said it then you wouldn’t have believed me.”  He looked at her; it was true.

“But now,” she went on rapidly, “you must believe me.  If I come now to live with you and work for you, no one can accuse me of mercenary motives—­not even you, Max.  I shan’t get anything from the bargain but you, and that is all I want.”

“This is madness,” said Riatt, trying not very sincerely to free himself.

“Yes, of course it’s mad, like all really logical things,” she answered.  “But that’s the way it’s going to be.  I love you, and I am going to stay with you.”

“I couldn’t let you,” he said.  “I couldn’t accept such a sacrifice.”

“A sacrifice, Max.  That’s the first really stupid thing I ever heard you say.  It isn’t a sacrifice; it’s a result, a consequence of the fact that I love you.  It isn’t a question of my doing it, or your letting me.  It simply can’t be otherwise.  The other things I used to value—­parties and pretty clothes and luxuries—­they were a sort of game I played because I did not know any other.  But only part of me was alive then.  I was like a blind person; and they were my stick; but now that I can see, the stick is just in my way.  It isn’t silly and romantic to believe in love, Max.  The hardest-headed, most practical people believe in it—­every one who has any sense really believes in it, when they find it.  To be poor, to be uncomfortable—­it’s a price, but a small one to pay for love.  Isn’t that true—­true, at least, as far as you’re concerned?”

“Oh, yes, as far as I’m concerned—­”

“Then what right have you to think it’s not true to me?  Don’t be such a moral snob, Max.  If love’s the best thing in the world for you, it’s ever so much more so for me—­I need it more.”