“I can’t answer for every man,” he said reflectively.  “There are all kinds of men.  And that’s not mentioning the queers, who aren’t real men at all.  Take a dozen sound, normal, healthy men and if you could find out the truth about them, which it would be pretty hard to do, you’d find immense differences in their wants, habits, feelings; in the way things took them.  But I’ve a notion that nine out of the dozen, if you could get down to the actual bedrock facts about them, would own up that if they were in love with a woman—­really, you know, all the way—­they wouldn’t want her for a partner, and wouldn’t be able to see her as a friend.  That’s just a guess, of course.  But there’s one thing I know, and that is that I couldn’t.”

She gave a little shiver. “Oh, what a mess it is!” she said.  “What a perfectly hopeless blunder it is!” She slid down from the wall.  “Come; let’s walk.”

He fell in beside her and they tramped sturdily along for a while in silence.  At last she said, “Can you tell me why?  Suppose there hadn’t been any one else with me; suppose I’d felt toward you the way you did toward me, then; why couldn’t you have gone on being my friend and partner as well as my lover?  You’d have known I was worth it; have known I understood the things you were interested in and—­yes, and was able to help you to work them out.  Why would all that have had to go?”

“Oh, I don’t know that I can explain it,” he said.  “But I don’t think I’d call it a blunder that a strip of spring steel can’t bend in your fingers like copper and still go on being a spring.  You see, a man wants his work and then he wants something that isn’t his work; that’s altogether apart from his work; doesn’t remind him of it.  Love’s about as far away as anything he can get.  So that the notion of our working ourselves half to death over the same job, and then going home together ...”

“Yes,” she admitted.  “I can see that.  But that doesn’t cover friendship.”

He owned that it didn’t.  “But when I’m in love with a woman—­this isn’t a fact I’m proud of, but it’s true—­I’m jealous of her.  Not of other men alone, though I’m that, too, but jealous of everything.  I want to be all around her.  I want to be everything to her.  I want her to think there’s nobody like me; that nobody else could be right and I be wrong.  And I want to be able to think the same of her.  I want her to hide, from me, the things about herself that I wouldn’t like.  When I ask her what she thinks about something, I want her to say—­what I want her to think.  I know what I want her to think, and if she doesn’t say it she hurts my feelings.”

He thought it over a bit longer and then went on.  “No, I’ve been in love with women I could suspect of anything.  Women I thought were lying to me, cheating me; women I’ve hated; women I’ve known hated me.  But I’ve never been in love with a woman who was my friend.  I’d never figured it out before, but it’s so.”