“‘Love is strong as death,’ eh?” said McCall, awkwardly holding the gate open for her.  “Friendship ought to be tough enough to bear a pretty stout strain, then.  Such friendship as ours, I mean.  For I think a man and woman can be friends without—­without—­Well, what do you think, Maria?” feeling a sudden imbecility in all his big body.

The little woman beside him looked up scared and ready to cry:  “I don’t know, John, I’m sure.  Do be quiet, Hero!” Then like a flash she saw that he meant to ask her to marry him:  he meant to place love upon the higher basis of friendship.  Maria was used to people who found new names for old things.  Why! why! what folly was this, as she grew cold and hot by turns?  So often she had pictured his coming to claim her, and how she would go out as one calm controlling soul should to meet another, to be dual yet united through all eternity; and here she was shivering and tongue-tied, like any silly school-girl!  Love-making and marriage were at a discount with the Advanced Club of which she was a member, and classed with dancing, fashionable dressing and other such paltry feminine frivolities.  But Maria had meant to show them that a woman could really love and marry, and preserve her own dignity.  She tried to find her footing now.

“Come into the summer-house, John.  I should think our friendship would bear any strain, for it does not depend on external ties.”

“No, that’s true.  Now, as to your phalansteries and women’s clubs and sitz-baths, why that’s all flummery to me.  But young women must have their whims until they have husbands to occupy their minds, I suppose.  There’s that little girl at the Book-shop:  how many leagues of tatting do you suppose she makes in a year?”

“I really cannot say,” sharply.

“But as to our friendship, Maria—­”

“Yes.  There may be a lack of external bonds” (speaking deliberately, for she wanted to remember this crisis of her life as accurate in all its minutiae); “but there is a primal unity, a mysterious sympathy, in power and emotion.  At least, so it seems to me,” suddenly stammering and picking up Hero to avoid looking at McCall, who stood in front of her.

“I don’t know.  Primal unities are rather hazy to me.  I can tell by a woman’s eye and hand-shake if she is pure-minded and sweet-tempered, and pretty well, too, what she thinks of me.  That’s about as far as I go.”

“It pleases you to wear this mask of dullness, I know,” with an indulgent smile, with which Titania might have fondled the ass’s head.

“But as to our friendship,” gravely, “I feel I’ve hardly been fair to you.  Friendship demands candor, and there is one matter on which I have not dealt plainly with you.  You have been an honest, firm friend to me, Maria.  I had no right to withhold my confidence from you.”

If Miss Muller had not been known as an advanced philosopher, basing her life upon the Central Truths, she would have gained some credit as a shrewd woman of business.  “What do you mean, John?” she said, turning a cool I steady countenance toward him.