“If it weren’t true,” she persisted, “you wouldn’t be excited like that.  If I hadn’t known it before, I’d have known it when I saw you with the Lakes.  You can give them something you can’t give me, not with all the love in the world.  I never heard about them till to-night—­not in a way I’d remember.  And there are other people—­you spoke of some of them at dinner—­who are living here, that you’ve never mentioned to me before.  You’ve tried to sweep them all out of your life; to go to dances and the opera and things with me.  You did it because you loved me, but it wasn’t fair to either of us, Roddy.  Because you can’t love me all the time.  I don’t believe a man—­a real man—­can love a woman all the time.  And if she makes him hate her when he doesn’t love her, he’ll get so he hates loving her.”

“You’re talking nonsense!” he said again roughly.  He was pacing the room by now.  “Stark staring nonsense!”

Of course the reason it caught him like that was simply that it echoed so uncannily the things that went through his own head sometimes in his stolen hours of solitude—­thoughts he had often tried, unavailingly, to stamp out of existence.

“I’d like to know where you get that stuff.  Is it from James Randolph?  He’s dangerous, that fellow.  Oh, he’s interesting, and I like him, but he’s a cynic.  He doesn’t want anybody to be happier than he is.  But what may be true of him, isn’t true of me.  I’ve never stopped loving you since the first day we talked together.  And I should think I’d done enough to prove it.”

“That’s it,” she said.  “You’ve done too much.  And you’re so sorry for me when you don’t love me, that it makes you do all the more.”

She had found another joint in his armor.  She was absolutely clairvoyant to-night, and this time he fairly cried out, “Stop it!”

Then he got himself together and begged her pardon.  “After all, I don’t see what it comes to,” he said.  “I don’t know what we’re fighting about to-night.  You’re saying you think we ought to do more playing around with the Lakes and people like that; not spend all our time with the Casino set, as we have done this winter.  Well, that may be good sense.  I’ve no objection certainly.”

“Well, then,” she said, “that’s settled—­that’s one thing settled.  But there’s something else.  Oh, it all comes to the same thing, really.  Roddy,”—­she had to gulp and draw a long breath and steady herself before this—­“Roddy, how much money have you got, and how much are we spending?”

“Oh, good lord!” he cried. “Please don’t go into that now, Rose.  It’s after one o’clock, and you’re worn to a frazzle.  If we’ve got to go into it, let’s do it some other time, when we can be sensible about it.”

“When I am, you mean?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, I’m sensible now.  I can’t help it if my—­voice chokes and my eyes fill up.  That’s silly, of course, but down in my mind, I don’t believe I’ve ever been as sensible as I am right now.  And I’ve had the nerve to ask—­I don’t know when I will again—­and I know you won’t bring the subject up by yourself.  I’ve been trying to for ever so long.  But money’s always seemed the one thing I couldn’t b-bear to talk about with you.